Holiday traditions are resurfacing, but celebrating and gift-giving remain challenges in a socialist world

By TRACEY EATON / The Dallas Morning News

HAVANA – A long line snaked around a corner and up three flights of stairs to a store called Everything for One Dollar. Suddenly, the doors opened and customers
rushed inside.

"This is our salvation," said Rosa María Jiménez, 43, a cafeteria worker who sifted through a jumble of $1 toy motorcycles from China. "Without this store, I don't know
where I would find Christmas presents I can afford."

But Christmas shopping isn't for the fainthearted in Cuba, a bedraggled communist nation still refusing to embrace capitalistic ways. Holiday bargains are tough to find.
Some stores seem intent on discouraging sales rather than boosting them. And clerks and cashiers are often rude or indifferent, shoppers complain.

"They don't care about helping you. They'd rather sit there and talk on the phone or gossip with other workers," said Ángel González, a taxi driver. "You go into the store
and you're an inconvenience, not a customer."

One of Havana's busiest shopping centers is called Carlos III. It features two Everything for One Dollar stores, along with two shops selling goods for $5 and $10.

On a recent morning, those two latter stores were almost empty, but the $1 store was packed. A sign warned shoppers that they weren't allowed to buy anything in bulk.
A female clerk stood on a platform and shouted at customers, "There's no testing of the cologne! Put that down!"

Some shops routinely lock their doors once more than two or three customers are inside. That's to prevent theft, clerks say, but customers don't like it, saying the stores
would be better off hiring more workers.

The challenge of shopping is only one of the hurdles that holiday-minded Cubans face.

The Cuban government stopped observing Christmas in 1969. President Fidel Castro reinstated it as a national holiday in December 1997 – but for that year only – as a
gesture of good will before Pope John Paul II's trip to the island in January 1998.

The socialist government has had an uneasy relationship with the Catholic Church for decades, and even today some Castro loyalists view Christmas with suspicion.
Even so, many families plan low-budget celebrations.

"The tradition of Christmas is coming back," said Laura Herrera, 41, an auditor in Havana. "I celebrate it with my family, but of course we can't afford turkey. We'll eat
chicken. And I'll put up a little Christmas tree. I put a new ornament on it each year because I've heard that's how you're supposed to do it."

Just how to celebrate Christmas remains a bit of a mystery to some Cubans.

"It's difficult to change your ways after not celebrating Christmas for so many years. When I was born, there was no Christmas," said Alejandro Homar, 36, a radio
station director.

The government pays much more attention to New Year's Day – which marks the triumph of the 1959 communist revolution.

Christmas is a decidedly low-key, noncommercial affair. There are no holiday ads, no towering displays in stores, no children sitting on Santa's lap.

Contrast that with the Christmas splurge in the United States. Holiday spending in the United States this year is expected to rise to a staggering $217 billion, according to
the National Retail Federation, a trade association. That's more than eight times the entire gross domestic product of Cuba, still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet
Union more than a decade ago.

Meantime, many Cubans say they won't buy any gifts because they have no money to spare.

"It's just not going to be possible to buy any presents," Antonio Diaz, 37, a Havana port worker who just missed two months of work because of an injury. "But I would
like to go to church on Christmas Day."

Others plan to literally dig up gag gifts, unearthing rocks and wrapping them up for their friends.

Berlinda Pérez, 30, a homemaker, has something else in mind: She and her friends and family plan a night of dance, dominoes and conversation.

"It's a large group, and no one has enough money to get gifts for everyone else," she said. "So we'll draw names, and we'll each give one gift to someone else."

Raúl Musibay, co-author of an upcoming publication called The Three Guys From Miami Cuban Party Book, said that when he was growing up in Cuba before the
1959 revolution, his parents never failed to give their children holiday presents.

"We didn't receive a lot of gifts, but those that we did get were very nice. One memorable year I received both a new bike and a pair of boots," he said.

"After the revolution, toys of any kind became very scarce," said Cuban-American Jorge Castillo, a co-author of the book. "My parents had to struggle to find maybe
three toys for me. One was fairly good, and the other two were really mediocre – all made in China."

"Even in those very bad times, we continued our family traditions as best as we could," Mr. Musibay said. "We never gave up the tradition of gift-giving."

Like many Cuban families, he said, his parents passed out gifts on Jan. 6, not on Christmas, in honor of the Three Wise Men.

Nowadays that continues, although some Cubans have picked up the American tradition of exchanging gifts on Christmas.

But it's not easy.

One of Havana's fanciest shopping centers is Galerías de Paseo, just off the Malecón, the city's famed seaside highway. Many products – from TVs to boomboxes –
cost two and sometimes three times more than they would in the United States.

One store features a garish three-piece living room set for $2,285, an astronomical price in a country where most people earn $10 per month. A flimsy plastic table was
marked $27.40. Down a corridor, another store sold bags of Waggles dog food for $52.95. And another had a low-end Phillips hi-fi system on sale for $281.95.

Many Cubans are astounded by such prices.

"Everything's very expensive. No one is thinking about we poor people," one customer wrote in a complaint book at the shopping center.

"It's not easy to buy anything these days," agreed Anet Almeida, 20, a homemaker. "Stores have cut some prices, but it's not enough."

Others say they'll find a way to celebrate anyway.

"I want to give my mother a bottle of perfume and some talcum powder this year," said Harold Elizechea, 18, a computer science student. "I'll get my dad a dress shirt
and my sister a stuffed doll."