But she knows “the flood” is coming.
As the United States starts to ease the restrictions on travel and commerce with Cuba, a swell of American tourists is expected to arrive with fat wallets. New eating places are already opening every week, poised to greet them. A high-rise apartment building looms over Ms. Espinosa’s Paladar Los Amigos– “The Friends’ Restaurant.” Young men in suits invite tourists from the street to an avant-garde dining room on the 10th floor. They find an airy perch over the city offering gourmet meals that run $30 served by a smart waitstaff.
That’s cheap by tourist standards. Impossible for most Cubans. It’s more than the monthly average wage here.
“I’m trying to keep the price low for Cubans,” Espinosa tells me, as workmen carve into her concrete entranceway to put in a small bar. She has surrendered her own living room to squeeze in six more tables. She has printed up two menus – one for locals and one with higher prices for tourists.
“Foreigners ought to pay a little more.” She offers an irresistible smile. “You have deep pockets.”
Espinosa is the face of Cuba’s anxiety at the expected end of the 55-year US embargo, which the Obama administration has already started to loosen. Sweeping new rules adopted on Sept. 21, for instance, allow American companies to open offices in Cuba and remove limits on the amount of money that can be brought to the island nation.
For Cubans, uncertainties loom. Will the coming changes unshackle the island from its dire poverty? Or will those changes enrich an affluent upper class, ripping apart the we’re-in-it-together social pact forged in Cuba’s revolution over the past half century?
“We’re hopeful for better times,” says Espinosa, who opened her place two decades ago with three tables and 12 chairs, and has been “sweating and fighting and struggling” to keep it going since. She is impeccably dressed on a sweltering summer day. And gracious to a reporter who wanders up during a two-week amble to see a changing Cuba.
“The hardest thing is to get supplies,” Espinosa is saying. “If the embargo goes, it should be easier to get supplies.”
She has families who have come here once a year, a vacation treat, for 18 years. And she gets laborers with dusty trousers and hardened hands who want her pork tamales. So her menu still offers full meals for $3 or $4. “These are my people,” she says. “A family with a normal salary, at least one day a month, they can come and afford a celebration.”