Cuba’s Magic Numbers : Life Has Never Been Worse on Castro’s Island. Some Cope with Poverty by Stealing. Some By Black-Market Dealing. Most Pin Their Hopes on La Bolita, The Illegal Lottery

The rocking chair is worn and dilapidated, like the rest of Cuba. Manuel sits in the shade of his porch on the outskirts of Havana, overlooking a neighborhood of modest homes baking in the August sun. Idly waving away the summer’s plague of flies, he rocks and waits for a sign.

Nothing stirs on the cracked and potholed street stretching in front of his house. At the corner, a line of people waits endlessly for a bus. Another Soviet-made truck roars past, enveloping the queue in a cloud of gritty smoke. Across the street, a vacant lot has been turned into a tiny park adorned with a pair of benches. A rail-thin drunk staggers into the park and passes out on a bench, his arm flung across his grizzled face to block out the blinding sun.

“I can’t see anything,” I say.

“The drunk,” says Manuel. “Forty-nine.”

In Cuba, everything can be reduced to numbers. To Manuel’s practiced eye, the landscape is filled with symbols--sun, flies, line, truck, park and drunk--each of which has a numeric equivalent. If he can interpret the scene correctly, one of those symbols might represent that night’s winning number in la bolita , Cuba’s illegal lottery. Every evening, millions of Cubans put their pesos down with a local lottery bank and cross their fingers: Tonight may be the night!

From his porch, Manuel spots Julio, his clothes billowing like sails about his gauntness. Julio hoves to and settles his bones into a chair. Julio is a listero , the man who takes the bets, the lowest-level employee in a bolito organization. Manuel tells him about the revelation of the drunk. Julio nods; it is a sign. Manuel hands him 10 pesos (25 cents) to put on 49, the number assigned to drunk, and 89, the number of the lottery itself, which we have been discussing all afternoon. From the folds of his shirt, Julio withdraws a sheet of paper, marks down the numbers and gives Manuel a receipt. If the police see this simple transaction, it will mean a fine and three to nine months in jail for Manuel and as much as four years in jail for Julio.

*

August, 1994, was Cuba’s fourth anniversary under the revolutionary government’s Special Period in Peacetime, the austerity program intended to defend socialism after the disappearance of Soviet aid in the late ‘80s. That month also saw the most violent protests against the revolution in more than 30 years. Rioters smashed the windows of Havana stores and hotels, and tens of thousands of unhappy Cubans fled on rafts toward the United States. Since then, the tensions have abated but not the underlying problems.

For most Cubans, life has never been worse. Despite revolutionary rhetoric, the socialist safety net has collapsed. The new reality: You need money to survive. The only reliable sources of food, clothing and medicine are government-run dollar stores. The official exchange is one peso to one dollar, but ever-changing black market rates are approximately 40 pesos to one dollar. The average Cuban salary is less than $10 a month, and without dollars you cannot survive.

In response, many Cubans have decided to opt out of the revolutionary system, to stay home para resolver , “to resolve” life’s necessities. Some lucky ones have relatives able to circumvent U.S. restrictions on sending dollars to Cuba. Others survive by stealing from the state or by dealing on the black market. For the rest, tiene que inventar : “You have to improvise.” It is never enough.

Many Cubans see only one way para resolver : by playing la bolita , an illegal lottery game with deep roots in Cuban culture. La bolita is one of the original sins in revolutionary Cuba. To the revolution, gambling is anathema, associated with the reviled dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Before 1959, on any Havana street you could bet on cockfighting, cards, dice, jai-alai, horse racing and slot machines, and the fancy tourist hotels housed casinos run by American gangster Meyer Lansky and his mob. For Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries, Cuba’s social evils--drugs and prostitution--seemed to spring from games of chance. Millions in rake-offs supported Batista and corrupted the political system.

Batista fled Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959, and within days the new government had outlawed all gambling games. When Castro announced in 1961 that the revolution was a Marxist-Leninist movement, gambling suddenly became not just another crime but a “capitalist ulcer.”

Still, gambling persists. It is a Cuban tradition. The Spanish conquistadors broke the monotony between battles by gambling on cards and dice. Games of chance were illegal in colonial Cuba, but in 1812 the Spanish crown, drained by European wars, decided to establish an official lottery. Soon every man, woman and child was buying tickets and dreaming of lottery numbers.

Around 1876, a Chinese shop owner in Havana cashed in on lottery mania by introducing Cubans to the mysteries of the 36 numbers game, known as chee fah in Cantonese and chiff in Cuba. Every number between 1 and 36 has an attendant symbol. The owner would draw the number and its symbol on a sheet of paper, roll it up and hang it in front of his store. Anyone who could guess the number would win a small jackpot. As a lure, he handed out little verses called charadas , which were riddles whose answer was the symbol. At a certain hour, no more bets were taken, the paper was unrolled and the winner was announced.

The only complaint of the public was that they suspected the games were rigged; it was too easy to switch the numbers. The bankers responded by hitching their game to the national lottery; the possible numbers expanded from 36 to 100. Chiff was renamed la bolita , after the “little ball” drawn in the official lottery. Despite the relentless crackdowns since 1959, la bolita has managed to survive and even thrive. In the poor neighborhoods far from the orbits of official Cuba, it is the residents’ passion, their only hope. Every evening, the hottest question in Cuba is, “ Que salio ?” (What came out?)

*

On the porch, Julio notices me looking at a string of green and yellow beads hanging around his wrist. He tells me it is a sign of devotion to Orula, the deity of divination. Julio is a creyente , a believer in Cuban Santaria, the religion of Africa’s Yoruba people transposed to a New World Catholic setting. When the Yoruba slaves came to Cuba in the 19th Century, they hid their African deities under the disguises of Catholic saints. One of the cornerstones of the Santaria faith is Ifa, the art of foretelling the future. The system of divination is based on chance, on throwing shells or nuts and seeing in their falls the caminos or roads that will help the followers fulfill their destinies.

I ask Julio whether Santaria can be used to find the winning numbers.

“No, no, no,” he responds. No creyente would use Ifa for something as mundane as foretelling the numbers. However, the methods of divination used in la bolita may have their roots in Santeria. The signs of the future are everywhere; the trick is having the right spiritual attitude to interpret them. For many, this state is a kind of religious vision, when you see behind the surface of things to the invisible paths of power running the world.

Julio uses Santeria to enhance that vision: “Luck comes from my head (the seat of his deity). I use my head to look for images that can tell me the numbers. Some people, when they have problems in life, they sit down to work out the numbers, but at that moment they lose them. The problem is, their head isn’t fresh. Santeria helps me rogar mi cabeza (“to pray to my head”), so the inspiration comes more easily.”

Rogar la cabeza is performed in initiation ceremonies when the mind must be purified to prepare it for the seating of the deity. It is also performed if the creyente is worried or distracted.

Julio washes his head in coconut water; the result is clear vision, with all the obstacles erased. After one such rite, Julio dreamed of a bicycle (52) and found a bill in his pocket with “96” written on it. His vision was clear; those were the signs. He won 8,500 pesos.

*

The streets of Old Havana smell of raw sewage in the heat. Skinny dogs slink down the sidewalks, sniffing through scattered piles of garbage. Dirty water drips from balconies; shouts echo off slowly collapsing walls. Jobless youths in tattered shirts idle on the corners, eyes watching for the police while they furtively trade in cigarettes, bootleg rum and a plate of ham sandwiches.

Jorge, a friend of Manuel, leads me into a decrepit building, its courtyard rebounding with the shouts of running children. We climb to Antonio’s one-room apartment, where the heat hangs in a bluish, cigarette-fueled haze. On a chair by the door, a dark-skinned doll is enshrined, with peso notes pinned to its clothes and cigars and a glass of water at its feet. This is Eleggua, the opener of roads, the trickster god of Santeria.

Antonio sits at his table, chain-smoking. The sweat beads on his brow; there is no fan to move the stifling air. On the wall hangs an olive-green cap; a sheet of paper covered with numbers lies on the table in front of him. Antonio is an officer in the “glorious and ever-faithful” Revolutionary Armed Forces--and a listero . I am shocked; Jorge shrugs and smiles. In one of the ironies of the Special Period, even guardians of the revolutionary flame tiene que inventar .

“I have to be a listero in order to live,” Antonio says defensively. “It’s the only job I can make money at without robbing someone. As a soldier, I make six pesos (15 cents) a day. A pack of cigarettes costs 10 pesos, and I smoke two packs a day. Look at me, look at this apartment. I don’t even have a fan or a refrigerator.”

He yells for one of his children to bring him a glass of water. An old woman enters the apartment and pulls out some crumpled pesos. She is playing 29 because it is her birthday and 12, holy woman, her favorite number.

Cuba has no official lotteries because there are no random events in a socialist society. The winning numbers must come from abroad. Every weekday evening at 10, Cubans tune their Soviet shortwave radios to the frequency of Ecos de Torbe, a station broadcasting from Venezuela. A delirious baritone announces the first-, second- and third-place winning tickets in the provincial lottery. The last two digits of the five-digit Venezuelan tickets become the winners of the Cuban bolita .

The old woman bets 29 and 12, fijo and corrido , the two most common ways of playing la bolita . Fijo is a gamble that 29 or 12 will appear as the last two digits of the first place winning ticket, with a 75-to-1 payout. Corrido is similar to a show bet at the track; the old woman is betting that the numbers will appear in any of the three places on odds of 20 to 1. If she were more daring, she would also play parl or candado , betting that she can guess two or three of the winners for 800-1 and 2,400-1 odds, respectively. Although the largest pot rarely amounts to more than $300, this sum makes the difference between a few basic comforts and the grinding shortages of the Special Period.

Antonio marks the old woman’s numbers and the amount of her bets on the list. The maximum bet on any one number is about 30 pesos (75 cents), ensuring that a run of big wins does not break the bank. The bank has also decreed a few limitados , popular numbers on which it will not take bets, such as recent winners and holy days. Antonio has an interest in the success of his regulars, because he receives a percentage of their winnings. To ensure repeat business, he cultivates a reputation as an honest listero who brings his clients un mano fresco , “a fresh hand”--good luck.

*

At 8 that evening, Antonio closes his list--no more bets--and waits for his collector, the next rung up in the numbers organization, called the banco , or bank. Bancos are as secretive as any Leninist revolutionary party. Above Antonio are as many as a dozen collectors, a chief collector and the banquero , banker, but Antonio only knows his contact.

The chief collector takes the lists from his corps of collectors and oversees the operation; the banquero provides the capital to cover any losses. Every evening, the chief collector brings the lists to la mesa , the table where he and his accountants check the lists for winners and divide the money. Often only the head collector knows the banquero’s identity.

Antonio claims that he sighted his banquero only once. “I had to visit my collector because of a problem with a list. He had a visitor, a man in a general’s uniform, and told me to wait outside. Afterward, I asked him, ‘Who was that guy?’ ‘That was the banquero ,’ he said.”

Antonio slams the table. “Generals and functionaries--those are the only sons-of-bitches that have enough money to be bankers!”

He yells at his children: Where is his water?

No one knows how many bancos there are in Havana. Antonio claims there are more than 100 in Old Havana alone. Assuming an average of 1,000 players serviced by each banco , that stretches the bounds of credibility. Nevertheless, outside of the Vedado and Miramar neighborhoods, home to many of the revolutionary elite, everybody I meet knows how to play, and they know the identity of the local listero. La bolita is ubiquitous.

Between customers, Antonio pulls out of a hiding place one of his most treasured possessions: a computer printout of the cabala , an esoteric guide to the lottery numbers and their symbols. If the police found this book, it would mean an automatic jail term. “Look, even the scientists are playing la bolita ,” he says. (In Cuba, only scientists and a few government offices are likely to have computers.)

The cabala is a guide to finding the winning numbers in your dreams and in the events of daily life. Its core is the charada , a list of symbols for every number from 1 to 100. The original, the Charada China, is the most widely used, but if it does not have the symbol you are looking for, you can try the Charada Matancera, Hindu, Americana, Cubana or Oriental.

New York, banana, pigeon, sea voyage, dream, roller skates, telegram, midnight and Havana’s Capitol are all designated by the number 87 in the cabala. Antonio is fortunate to have a preprinted cabala ; most Cubans laboriously copy theirs by hand.

As we leave him, he is still yelling for water. Later, Jorge tells me why Antonio has no fan or refrigerator, why he is so angry. He has gambled big and lost. Instead of giving his list to the bank, he told the collector that the police had been around, so he had not taken any bets. He kept the list and the money, hoping to make a nice profit after paying off his players. But luck turned against him: His players won big, and he had to sell the fan and refrigerator to cover their winnings. Now he is planning to keep the list again, gambling that he can earn enough to buy back his appliances.

*

In his 1955 Buick, Manuel’s friend Carlito and I cruise along one of the ring roads linking Havana’s suburbs. We are going to see a man everybody says is a banker. Dirt streets lead to poor neighborhoods of wooden shacks and little children running naked in the yard. Along one of these streets rises a neat, two-story, brick-and-concrete house.

The walls are freshly painted, curtains hang in the windows and a TV antenna ascends to the sky. Its owners are Pepe and Nilda, a chubby couple in their late 40s. A full-size refrigerator looms in the kitchen, and each floor has an enormous Russian television set.

The neighbors call it “the house that la bolita built.”

“ La bolita is the easiest way to make enough money to raise a family,” says Pepe.

“Are you a banker?” I ask him.

“No, no, I’m just a player. I’ve just been luckier than others.”

His biggest win came from a near accident. He was crossing the street when a bicyclist whizzed by, nearly knocking him down and running over his feet. His shoes were ruined, so he had to buy a new pair. That night he played 31, 96 and 52--old shoes, new shoes and bicycle--and won 5,500 pesos ($137.50)

Ninety-five percent of their neighbors play la bolita , according to Pepe and Nilda, even the children. The other 5% are either the rare Cubans who do not like to gamble or those condemned to lives with no luck. The local policemen do not play; they send their wives to do it for them. The neighborhood still has its Committee for the Defense of the Revolution to protect them from “subversive elements,” but five years of the Special Period have dissolved the authority of the trompetas (“trumpets”), the CDR militants who once were a constant bullying presence.

“Here the rule is stick up for your neighbor,” says Nilda. “The trompetas have a hard time, because they don’t follow the rule. If they try to stop us from playing la bolita , we will make life very difficult for them. La bolita is the only thing that gives us hope for tomorrow.”

Despite this bravado, they take me up to the second floor, so prying eyes cannot see that they have a foreigner in the house.

Pepe and Nilda are viciosas-- addicts. They live to divine the winning numbers. They will even swallow their disdain for the revolution if they can find tonight’s winners in its designs. They can play Castro, for example. He is No. 1--but not just because he is el maximo lider . Since his rebel days in the Sierra Maestra, he has been el caballo , the horse, and in the charada , el caballo is also No. 1.

“We can also play against the revolution,” says Nilda. “If Fidel appears on TV, we might play 83, tragedy, the number of the Special Period, because that’s what he’s done to Cuba.”

Almost everyone is playing 38 and 65, money and food. Seven is the Virgin of Regla (who is also the sea goddess Yemaya of Santeria) and mierda , played when a diarrhea epidemic runs through the neighborhood. Ninety-three, revolution, has come out a lot this year.

Pepe and Nilda offer us lunch: steaming plates of rice and beans, boiled sweet potatoes and fried plantains. Nilda brings in a platter of grilled pork chops with curves of rib still attached. Following Cuban etiquette, the couple retire so the guests can eat in peace. Cubans eat in silence because as children they are told that it is bad manners to talk at meals.

Nevertheless, between bites, Carlito whispers, “‘Only a banker could afford this meal.”

*

After Julio leaves, Manuel and I borrow a pair of bicycles to pedal a few miles out to Raul and Gaby’s house. Beyond Manuel’s neighborhood, Havana’s outskirts grade imperceptibly into rural Cuba. The houses become poorer and the vegetation lusher, with vivid green banana and fruit trees rising between the dwellings.

By the side of a communal refuse pile, Raul and Gaby live in a wooden shack. A pig grunts in a pen along one wall, and chickens run in the yard next to a small garden. Behind the door, a small cabinet holds two metal caldrons filled with miniature iron tools, identifying the owners as devotees of Ogun, the Santeria iron deity. Although their clothes are frayed, they have a little meat to their bones, and their eyes are bright. Raul and Gaby are surviving.

The couple apologize for only having coffee to offer their guests. In these hard times, one of Cubans’ great embarrassments is that they have had to curtail their normally effusive hospitality. Raul’s and Gaby’s jobs ended two years ago; since then they have turned to la bolita to earn a living. He is a collector, and she works as an accountant at la mesa , the table where the bank’s nightly business is transacted. They are also hopelessly addicted players who spend every waking moment in a quest for the winning number.

At 8 p.m., when the lists are closed, Raul climbs on his bicycle and begins his work collecting. He has less than an hour to visit his listeros , collect their lists and count the money.

The lists are folded into little squares, which he stuffs into a cigarette pack for the dangerous journey along the blacked-out streets to la mesa. Two types of enemies prey on bolita collectors: robbers, who know collectors often carry thousands of pesos, and the police. The police often set up checkpoints for random searches of identity papers at night. If they find a scrap of paper scrawled with a few numbers in your pocket, you are automatically a player. The penalties range from a few months in jail for a player to eight years and the confiscation of all his possessions for a banquero.

Like a mafia family, the banco protects its own by paying the fines and taking care of the prisoner’s family while he or she is in jail. If Raul is stopped, he immediately throws the cigarette pack into the bushes and, if questioned, denies its ownership. If they do not notice it, he retrieves it later and continues to la mesa. For his risks, Raul receives a flat fee of around 500 pesos a month as well as a percentage of the profits if business is good.

By 9, the lists must arrive at la mesa , where Gaby and the other workers check for errors, recount the money and wait for the 10 o’clock announcement of the winners. Unfortunately, Venezuela is a long way away, and very few Havana radios hear the signal clearly. Arguments over what the announcer was really saying are the most common cause of bloodshed in the bolita world. The other danger of relying on the radio is official manipulation of the airwaves. On April 17, 1993, bancos were rocked by a huge number of bets on 33, 9 and 42, that night’s winners. Raul and Gaby smelled a rat and pulled out their bolita bible; they discovered that the same numbers had won on March 11. At 5 the next morning, they tuned in to the Venezuela station and heard a completely different--and correct--set of numbers. The government had taped the March 11 numbers, inserted the new date and passed the word on Cuba’s incredibly efficient rumor mill that 33, 9 and 42 were sure things. They jammed the Venezuelan signal and broadcast the doctored announcement behind a camouflage of static. The huge payouts “exploded” many banks.

When the numbers have been agreed on, Gaby and her cohorts set to work. Each list is scanned for winners, the payouts are totaled and the money is divided. The incriminating papers are burned as soon as the work is done, and the head collector leaves to distribute the payouts down the network. The oldest expression in la bolita is, “The bank loses and laughs; the player wins, and it disappears.”

Those rare occasions when the bank has to make a big payout often turn ugly. The gamblers expect their winnings immediately, and the penalty for non-payment may be death. A banquero’s only escape may be to disappear into Eastern Cuba or hop on a raft to Miami.

I ask Raul and Gaby why they are not living better on all their earnings from the banco. Raul pulls out another sheet of paper covered with figures.

“This is all the money that my listeros owe me,” he says. “They’re all viciosas , and they keep asking for loans.”

*

On the way back, one of my tires goes flat. Manuel’s house is more than two miles away along a winding avenue. As we walk, night falls, and not a light shines in all the neighborhoods we pass through. The electricity is off again. Clouds have covered the moon and stars, and I stumble over the cracks in the sidewalk. We begin to climb a long hill and now and then hear the whir of bicycles coasting by invisibly in the dark.

The next morning, the sun returns to scorch Havana. Julio drops by, and as he and Manuel chat, I can’t take it anymore.

“Well, what were the winning numbers?”

“Buzzard, bed and doctor,” says Julio. “Thirty-three, 57 and 80.”

Manuel shrugs his shoulders. His prediction, 49 for drunk and 89 for lottery, is good for three days. He rocks and looks out from his porch. The bench is empty, but the line for the bus is still there. He begins to count, one, two, three, four . . . 23 people waiting along the curb. It is a sign.