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

The ‘Gadget Guru’
On the outskirts of Havana, two icons make the typical Cuban neighborhood of San Francisco de Paula immortal — Ernest Hemingway, who once called it home, and Juan Martinez Rangel, who still does. To residents in San Francisco de Paula, both are local celebrities.

Neighbors call Martinez the “gadget guru.” For just pennies the retired machinist can transform an empty yogurt container into several electrical outlets, an old plastic dish drainer into a couple of water spigots.

A few years ago, when cooking gas regularly ran out, Martinez designed a backup stove to operate on either kerosene or gasoline. With no cash to buy a new refrigerator or fan, he built both from scratch. He even transformed a hydraulic truck lift he scavenged from the city dump into a machine that spits out plastic toys.

But that’s child’s play compared to his prize possession: “La Niña Bonita” — a jalopy-style car he assembled over a 20-year period with $70, a pile of scrap metal and junkyard parts.

A used tire supplied the brake pads, ¾ inch water piping provided the chassis, and old aluminum roofing furnished the body. He converted a motor from a Spanish water pump into the car’s engine, the carburetor and alternator were salvaged from a broken-down Russian motorcycle and the steering wheel was remolded from a discarded wheelchair.

“It runs like a normal car, goes forward and reverse, and can even get up to 42 miles an hour although I don’t like going that fast. It consumes too much gas,” complained Martinez. The vehicle gets 38 miles to the expensive $2.50 a gallon.

For the moment, Martinez doesn’t have to worry about rising gas prices. He keeps it parked in the middle of his living room after police ordered him to keep the unregistered contraption off the road.

Selling BBQs out the back door and cakes out the front
Oscar Millares is no different from millions of Cubans who went though a rough patch when the economy took a nosedive in the nineties. Like some 10 percent of the Cuban workforce, the electrician by trade gave up his government job when Moscow gave up on Havana, and started his own small business.

Using ancient tools including a century-old vertical drill, he welds outdoor barbecues, shoe racks and TV wall mounts from iron rods and discarded 55-gallon drums.

Business is brisk, he says. “My prices are a third of what the stores charge.” In part, that may be why he sells a bulk of his unlicensed products through the back door.

Roberto Leon, Nbc News Oscar Millares sits in front of the industrial size food processor he is building from scrap metal and an old bicycle for his wife.

Last year, the Cuban government decided to put a brake on private entrepreneurs like Millares — despite a U.N. recommendation that the island’s centralized economy move in the opposite direction. The Labor and Social Security Ministry began turning down people requesting work permits in some 40 broad categories of employment including metalworkers, booksellers, clowns and flower vendors.

While the Cuban government would rather everyone draw paychecks solely from the state, Millares asked, “Who can survive on that income.” Selling just one of his outdoor barbecues earns him as much as he made in a month at his old job.

His wife plans to boost the family income another notch by starting her own sideline and selling pastries out their front door.

She’s waiting for her husband to finish building her an over-sized food processor he started six months ago with $20 and the gears from his old bicycle. Along with a few tubes of aluminum piping and a motor from a broken floor fan, the machine will grate coconuts, squeeze oranges, and whip egg whites.

A similar piece of kitchen equipment, if even stocked locally, would easily cost ten times as much. Retail markup in Cuba ’s 5,000 government-run stores averages 130 percent.

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