Condoms as hair braids? A new car for $70?

HAVANA - Necessity is said to be the mother of invention but it almost sent this mom to an early grave.

One night, my teenage daughter and her friend were primping to go out when I found them rifling through a cardboard box stuffed with Chinese “Twin Lotus” condoms.

My heart stopping, my daughter pulled out a pair of scissors and began cutting them into strips. “Relax, Mom. We’re making Cuban rubber bands. I’m going to braid my hair.”

Cubans calls this “Inventando” — finding clever substitutes to life’s everyday shortages.

Days of the ‘fat cow’ long gone
An expectant father pulled apart an old sofa and used the wooden frame to make a crib. Another parent made her child’s birthday piñata from scraps of newspapers, recycled aluminum foil and wrapping paper she saved all year. A second-grade teacher encourages parents to bring in old work reports to replenish her supply of drawing paper.

People salvage just about everything here and consider very few things actual junk to be carted away in the trash. Many rural households even recycle old food and spoiled vegetables for animal feed.

In fact, where your average American produces almost 4 pounds of trash daily, Havana residents discard just under a pound.

This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when waste prevailed, years that Cubans nostalgically refer to as “La Vaca Gorda” — the fat cow.

Back then, the Soviet Union bestowed nearly $5 billion and 13 thousand tons of oil a year to the island.

Czechoslovakian buses polluted the capital, burning a gallon for every six miles of road. Construction brigades built bridges without connecting roads just to meet government-issued building quotas. Cuba’s massive state farms relied heavily on pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

That all changed in the 1990s when Moscow cut the purse strings, forcing the island to rethink conservation and people to resort to some truly inventive recycling.

Drive into any Cuban city and you’re assaulted with a political billboard urging environmental responsibility. “Water is life — don’t waste it” reads one. Another instructs “Conserve Electricity — use only what’s necessary.”

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