14ymedio, Havana, 11 January 2024 — While a group of Havana residents observe him, a senior officer of the Armed Forces parks his motorcycle next to a pump at the Los Paraguas Service Center in Guanabacoa. He doesn’t waste time on questions and goes directly to the gas station attendant. After a very brief conversation, and before the displeased looks of those present, the soldier returns to the vehicle, activates the hose and fills the tank.
The anger of those present has an explanation: before buying, each of them had to fight for the “privilege” of being included in a meticulous list of customers that the local government ordered to be drawn up during the fuel crisis of June 2023, and that has been reactivated a few days before the announcement of the increase in fuel prices for next February. The soldier, whose uniform opens doors for him, is above these formalities.
One just has to go to Los Paraguas or the other service center in Guanabacoa, Corral Falso, to sense the drivers’ discomfort. Dozens of sullen faces gather around a woman who gives blunt instructions to those who want to buy: “You have to sign up for the Telegram group.”
The speaker is the person in charge of making the daily list of buyers through the messaging application. On Telegram she identifies herself simply as Esther, although there is a team behind her – also with simple nicknames, such as Yanet or Carilda – which claims to be “directed by the government of Guanabacoa.” Her mantra, which she repeats when a client questions her authority, is: “This is not anarchy, it is queue control, avoiding hoarding, profits, queues, etc.”
The Falso SC C. group had 4,025 members this Thursday; the one at Los Paraguas, 5,046. Every morning, about 20 users join. At approximately six in the morning, Esther tells the group that she is “awaiting information.” As the day progresses, the woman organizes the flow of clients through the client list of each service center, prepared in Excel.
Esther demands name, surname, license number, vehicle license plate and a telephone number. On more than one occasion she has stated that the list “is the same as in 2023” and that the names “were jealously guarded.” “The ones that don’t show up is because they were never there,” she alleges, and she invites the ones she does not know to “stand in line” to make their purchases after those who do show up.
However, this newspaper received a complaint from a reader who detected numerous irregularities in the customer inventory. The Los Paraguas Excel document lists 3,688 clients, of whom 114 are repeated up to four times and 77 do not have badges – a requirement that Ester always demands. In the case of Corral Falso, where 2,855 names are registered, there are 168 that are repeated up to four times and 40 without plates. Some 1,003 clients are on both lists.
No matter how much they accuse her, in groups and – according to her – privately, Esther keeps repeating that she does not have to give explanations. Next to her, a man in shorts and flip-flops acts as a bodyguard. Desperate, due to the lack of gasoline or the slowness of the queue, many customers tend to “get annoying.”
This Wednesday, Esther suspended the queue “until the police arrived and acted against three motorists who were threatening,” she told the group. “They got the wrong idea of the place. This is not a jungl
