El Resolver.
Via our good friend Gutset in The Real Cuba:
Too broke for boats, Cubans inflate condoms to find big fish
Juan Luis Rosello sat for three hours on the Malecon as the wind blew in from the Florida Straits, pushing the waves hard against the seawall of Havana’s coastal boulevard.
As darkness settled and the wind switched direction, Rosello pulled four condoms from a satchel and began to blow them up. When the contraceptives were the size of balloons, the 47-year-old cafeteria worker tied them together by their ends, attached them to the end of a baited fishing line and set them floating on the tide until they reached the end of his 750-foot line.
After six decades under U.S. embargo and Soviet-inspired central planning, Cubans have become masters at finding ingenious solutions with extremely limited resources. Few are as creative as what Havana’s fishermen call “balloon fishing,” a technique employing a couple of cents worth of condoms to pull fish worth an average month’s salary from the ocean.
On any given night in Havana, dozens of men can be found “balloon fishing” along the Havana seawall, using their homemade floats to carry their lines as far as 900 feet into the coastal waters, where they also serve to keep the bait high in the water and to increase the line’s resistance against the pull of a bonito or red snapper.
“No one can cast the line that far by hand,” said Ivan Muno, 56, who was fishing alongside Rosello.
For four more hours, he sat silently as the dark sea pounded the rocks below the seawall, algae flashing green in the waves beneath an enormous creamy moon, the sounds of the city muffled by the wind and water. By midnight, he was heading home without a catch, but planning to return soon.
“This is the most effective way to fish,” Rosello said. “Someone got this great idea and I can be here all night with the balloons out.”
How nice! Another fluff story out of Cuba! Let me see, we had the one about the man with 6 fingers on each hand, the one about the man who built the biggest bicycle in the world, the one about the teens and their wierd haircuts, and now this. Of course, this story fits in so perfectly with the image that Canadians, Eurotrash and others visiting Cuba have of Cuba as an oversexed, hot tropical country. Of course, there would be an abundance of condoms in Cuba! Nice story, meanwhile the dissidents continued to be beatened and not a peep in the MSM.