HAVANA - Lines stretched for blocks outside phone stores Monday as ordinary Cubans were allowed to sign up for cellular phone service for the first time.
The contracts cost about $120 to activate -- half a year's wages on the average state salary. And that doesn't include a phone or credit to make and receive calls. Still, lines formed before the centres opened, and waits grew to more than an hour.
"It's great. It's really great. And everyone wants to be first to sign up," said Usan Astorga, a 19-year-old medical student who stood for about 20 minutes before her line moved at all.
Getting through the day without a cellphone is unthinkable now in many countries, but Cuba's government limited access to cellphones as well as kitchen appliances, hotels and other luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of social life in communist Cuba.
President Raul Castro has pledged to do away these small but infuriating restrictions on daily life, and his popularity has surged as a result, defusing questions about whether his relative lack of charisma would make governing Cuba more difficult after his ailing older brother Fidel formally stepped down in February.
The new phone contracts allow Cubans to make and receive overseas calls, a key feature because the overwhelming majority of Cubans have relatives and friends in the United States.
Astorga planned to buy about $65 in credit -- enough, she hopes, for three months of very brief conversations.
"You can't talk all day because it's too expensive," she said. "It's only, 'hello, I'm here. Goodbye.' Or 'where are you?' and hang up."
She and about 90 others were waiting in a line that crossed the street and stretched for about half a block outside a phone store on Obispo Street, a crowded pedestrian mall running from Havana's Central Park to the historic Old Town district.
Outside a phone store in the upscale neighbourhood of Miramar, meanwhile, the line split in two and snaked off in different directions.
Teenagers and college students with expensive sunglasses and fashionable clothes dominated in the lines. But elderly housewives and an occasional construction worker with dusty boots and threadbare T-shirts also waited for the chance to buy.
Lines outside stores are common in Cuba since security personnel limit how many people are allowed in at a time, and phone centres are often especially crowded with Cubans waiting to pay their home phone bills.
But Monday's waits were longer than normal -- and everyone who turned up was waiting for a cell phone contract.
"I am in need, I need to have one," said Juana Verdez, a retiree who said a cellphone would make it easier to stay in touch with family members.
