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[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/lifestyle/living-on-the-water/

Living on the Water

When Aislyn Greene and Jeannie Cruz decided to buy a home last summer in the San Francisco area, they knew the suburbs wouldn’t be right for them. But they also quickly realized that living in a city center in the kind of home they wanted was way out of their budget.

“We were depressed and demoralized,” said Ms. Greene, an editor at Afar magazine in her late 30s. “We needed to do something fun.”

Ms. Cruz, a sonographer in her mid-40s, had noticed a community of houseboats in Sausalito during one of her sailing lessons. And that led the couple, on a lark, to tour a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,000-square-foot house on the West Pier, where they fell in love with the beamed-roof living room and the light and views in every direction.

“I never thought I would be living in a floating home,” Ms. Greene said. “But we both had a strong feeling we wanted to go for this house.” They moved in last November.

Across the country, other couples and professionals are also turning to houseboats as a way to live in the heart of cities without breaking the bank. While some live in houses that sit on concrete hulls, like the place that Ms. Cruz and Ms. Greene own, others choose smaller sailboats or yachts.

The relatively low cost of buying a boat and low docking fees can help reduce monthly housing costs, and boat owners say added bonuses include stunning views and vibrant social communities.

But living on the water has its challenges. Not only do you have to empty the septic tank, you also have relatively little living space. And bad weather can make you feel like you need to find shelter elsewhere.

Ms. Greene and Ms. Cruz paid $645,000 for their home in Sausalito. They had to draw a little from their Roth I.R.A. accounts and get help from family members to buy it. But to them it was worth it. While they haven’t officially christened their new home yet, its working name is “The Love Boat Has Docked.”

The Sausalito floating home community has 11 docks lined with houses of varying sizes: Some are as small as 400 square feet and relatively affordable, while others are valued at more than $1 million, with names like Unlimited Joy and Fairy Tale.

The community is so serene that geese and otters also call it home. And yet it’s only a 30-minute ferry ride to San Francisco, and downtown Sausalito is a 10-minute drive away. There is an ice cream shop, an organic grocery store, a seafood restaurant and a quaint cafe — all within walking distance.

“I love the peace and calm that comes from living on the water,” Ms. Greene said. “It’s truly soothing. No matter what is going on in our lives or the world, I feel my shoulders loosen when I look out the windows and see the water, or when I come home from work and walk down the docks.”

This is particularly true at night, she said, as there is little ambient light, apart from the light that comes from the homes, and it feels almost as if they are camping.

At first, Ms. Greene said, she noticed the motion during windy weather or when the tide was rising, but now it hardly registers: Her floating home feels just like any home built on land.

The couple’s house is attached by enormous brackets to pilings driven into the bay, so technically they are permanently docked, although the structure can be towed out if major repairs are needed. The couple pays for a berth lease, which includes water, garbage and sewage service, as well as maintenance of the docks and the ramp and pier that lead to their home.

More conventional boats used as homes can cost much less or much more, depending on scale.

“It could range anywhere from $1,500 to $15 million,” said Chris Mitchell, who lives on a houseboat in Jersey City.

The cost of docking a boat differs depending on where it is. In New York City, for example, a lease is based on a boat’s length and varies by season. In the winter, it can range from $70 to $90 a foot in some marinas, and in summer it can go up to between $250 and $320 a foot.

Kevin Wright, 44, a film producer in Chicago, used to get seasick, but that didn’t stop him and his wife, Colette Gabriel, 38, who runs a camera rental company, from moving permanently onto a yacht five years ago.

They owned a single-family house in the city that desperately needed an upgrade. They didn’t have the money to do the work properly, nor could they afford a nicer home. And becoming renters, and spending $2,000 a month on an apartment, they felt, would be a waste of money.

“One night we were drunk at a bar and said, ‘Let’s just move to the water,’” Mr. Wright said.

So they bought a 42-foot cabin motor-yacht with 350 square feet of living space, including a master bedroom, a small guest room, a living room, a kitchen and two bathrooms with showers. “That’s one more than we had in our house on land,” Mr. Wright said.

The yacht cost $77,000, and they spent another $25,000 on renovations. They rented a slip in the River City Marina in the South Loop for $1,200 a month, a fee that includes electricity, water and internet service.

While spending less on housing is certainly a perk, what keeps the couple on the boat is the lifestyle. There are nine houseboats in their marina, and many of the owners are their age. In the summer, they build fires in the firepits on the marina lawn or sit on the deck with cocktails.

“It feels like we are on vacation every day,” Mr. Wright said.

On the weekends, they sometimes take the boat to Michigan — “We don’t even need to pack,” he said — or to other marinas where the city has set aside free parking for boat owners.

Mr. Wright said he has gotten used to living on the water, and storms don’t usually bother him, as their home is well protected in the marina. “I only get seasick now when boats drive by too fast and set off waves,” he said proudly, something that happens only a couple of times a year.

Many marinas hold social events. Ms. Greene and Ms. Cruz said they can’t wait for summer, when their marina has float-in movies: Someone projects a movie onto the side of their house, and residents head over on boats or other floating objects to watch it.

Pavel Kocourek, 33, a doctoral candidate in economics at New York University, decided to live on a sailboat in a marina on City Island, in the Bronx, to save on living expenses. He bought his 41-foot boat for $10,000. It has a living area, a kitchen, a bathroom, four single beds and two double beds. Now his only expense is renting the slip, which costs much less than a conventional mortgage payment on a piece of property. In the past six months, he has paid $1,400 in total.

“I could live in New York City, but I would have to commute a lot, and I would have to live in a place with no light,” he said. “I feel happier since I’ve been living on a boat.”

He relishes the peace and quiet he gets after a long day of work at his office in Greenwich Village. “Most New Yorkers have no idea this place exists,” he said. “New York can be so overwhelming, so I like that I can go into the city and have excitement and then come here and have peace.”

Of course, there are other costs to living on the water. For Mr. Kocourek, it’s the commute. New York City has few marinas in the East or Hudson Rivers for a variety of reasons — among them, that ferries run so regularly their waves would ruin docked boats. To get home, Mr. Kocourek takes the 6 train to the last stop and then boards a bus or walks for 40 minutes.

“Last night, I went to a bar, and I was out until 3 a.m., and there are no buses,” he said. “It was too cold to walk, so I had to spend money on a cab.”

There is also the space issue.

“You can’t have much stuff,” Mr. Wright said. “If you love shoes, and you have to have 100 pairs of shoes, that isn’t going to work for you, because you don’t have a place to store them.”

Some boat owners see this as a positive, though, because it forces them to live minimally.

And winter can be particularly brutal. In the River City Marina in Chicago, the water sources that boaters use to fill their tanks are turned off to prevent exposed pipes from freezing.

“There is a building next to the marina, and there is a water spigot at that building,” Mr. Wright said. “Some of the other boaters, when the weather looks decent, we will get out a series of hoses and fill up our tanks.”

To conserve water throughout the season, he and his wife often shower at the gym.

He also worries about ice and snow. The docks can get slippery during a winter storm, and wind and sleet can also cause damage to the boats if they aren’t tied up properly.

But storms generally don’t bother the couple. “We stay,” he said. “We have thunderstorms, but in the Midwest we don’t have hurricanes, so it’s not a concern.”

But winter weather is the reason Will Haduch, 29, a contestant on “The Bachelorette” who works at G.M. Hill Engineering, left his houseboat in Jersey City in September 2017 to live on land in Hoboken, N.J.

“I’d do it again in the summer any time, but the winters were tough,” Mr. Haduch said. “Being out on the water, you’re so exposed to the wind.”

Another disadvantage is that houseboats don’t appreciate the way conventional houses on land do, said Skylar Olsen, the director of economic research at Zillow.

“When we think about home buying as an investment, the investment part generally comes from the increasing value of the land,” Ms. Olsen said. “As cities fill up, land with good access to amenities and jobs becomes more scarce, and the value of the home increases. So a houseboat — where you own the house itself, but rent the slip where the house is docked — doesn’t make a good long-term investment.”

The financial value of a boat often isn’t enough to be meaningful, said Chris Mitchell, 50, who owns a foreign-currency exchange business and lives on a boat in Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City. There is a great deal of wear-and-tear on boats, he noted, and older models are generally replaced by shiny new ones: “Boats depreciate. That’s all there is to it.”

But money isn’t everything. Living on the water has other, intangible benefits — one being that it brings you very close to nature.

Recently, Ms. Greene and Ms. Cruz noticed that geese had built a nest on their pier and laid some eggs. “They are our neighbors,” Ms. Cruz marveled. “How amazing is that.”

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.

[biofunmy]

Living on the Water – The New York Times

When Aislyn Greene and Jeannie Cruz decided to buy a home last summer in the San Francisco area, they knew the suburbs wouldn’t be right for them. But they also quickly realized that living in a city center in the kind of home they wanted was way out of their budget.

“We were depressed and demoralized,” said Ms. Greene, an editor at Afar magazine in her late 30s. “We needed to do something fun.”

Ms. Cruz, a sonographer in her mid-40s, had noticed a community of houseboats in Sausalito during one of her sailing lessons. And that led the couple, on a lark, to tour a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,000-square-foot house on the West Pier, where they fell in love with the beamed-roof living room and the light and views in every direction.

“I never thought I would be living in a floating home,” Ms. Greene said. “But we both had a strong feeling we wanted to go for this house.” They moved in last November.

Across the country, other couples and professionals are also turning to houseboats as a way to live in the heart of cities without breaking the bank. While some live in houses that sit on concrete hulls, like the place that Ms. Cruz and Ms. Greene own, others choose smaller sailboats or yachts.

The relatively low cost of buying a boat and low docking fees can help reduce monthly housing costs, and boat owners say added bonuses include stunning views and vibrant social communities.

But living on the water has its challenges. Not only do you have to empty the septic tank, you also have relatively little living space. And bad weather can make you feel like you need to find shelter elsewhere.

Ms. Greene and Ms. Cruz paid $645,000 for their home in Sausalito. They had to draw a little from their Roth I.R.A. accounts and get help from family members to buy it. But to them it was worth it. While they haven’t officially christened their new home yet, its working name is “The Love Boat Has Docked.”

The Sausalito floating home community has 11 docks lined with houses of varying sizes: Some are as small as 400 square feet and relatively affordable, while others are valued at more than $1 million, with names like Unlimited Joy and Fairy Tale.

The community is so serene that geese and otters also call it home. And yet it’s only a 30-minute ferry ride to San Francisco, and downtown Sausalito is a 10-minute drive away. There is an ice cream shop, an organic grocery store, a seafood restaurant and a quaint cafe — all within walking distance.

“I love the peace and calm that comes from living on the water,” Ms. Greene said. “It’s truly soothing. No matter what is going on in our lives or the world, I feel my shoulders loosen when I look out the windows and see the water, or when I come home from work and walk down the docks.”

This is particularly true at night, she said, as there is little ambient light, apart from the light that comes from the homes, and it feels almost as if they are camping.

At first, Ms. Greene said, she noticed the motion during windy weather or when the tide was rising, but now it hardly registers: Her floating home feels just like any home built on land.

The couple’s house is attached by enormous brackets to pilings driven into the bay, so technically they are permanently docked, although the structure can be towed out if major repairs are needed. The couple pays for a berth lease, which includes water, garbage and sewage service, as well as maintenance of the docks and the ramp and pier that lead to their home.

More conventional boats used as homes can cost much less or much more, depending on scale.

“It could range anywhere from $1,500 to $15 million,” said Chris Mitchell, who lives on a houseboat in Jersey City.

The cost of docking a boat differs depending on where it is. In New York City, for example, a lease is based on a boat’s length and varies by season. In the winter, it can range from $70 to $90 a foot in some marinas, and in summer it can go up to between $250 and $320 a foot.

Kevin Wright, 44, a film producer in Chicago, used to get seasick, but that didn’t stop him and his wife, Colette Gabriel, 38, who runs a camera rental company, from moving permanently onto a yacht five years ago.

They owned a single-family house in the city that desperately needed an upgrade. They didn’t have the money to do the work properly, nor could they afford a nicer home. And becoming renters, and spending $2,000 a month on an apartment, they felt, would be a waste of money.

“One night we were drunk at a bar and said, ‘Let’s just move to the water,’” Mr. Wright said.

So they bought a 42-foot cabin motor-yacht with 350 square feet of living space, including a master bedroom, a small guest room, a living room, a kitchen and two bathrooms with showers. “That’s one more than we had in our house on land,” Mr. Wright said.

The yacht cost $77,000, and they spent another $25,000 on renovations. They rented a slip in the River City Marina in the South Loop for $1,200 a month, a fee that includes electricity, water and internet service.

While spending less on housing is certainly a perk, what keeps the couple on the boat is the lifestyle. There are nine houseboats in their marina, and many of the owners are their age. In the summer, they build fires in the firepits on the marina lawn or sit on the deck with cocktails.

“It feels like we are on vacation every day,” Mr. Wright said.

On the weekends, they sometimes take the boat to Michigan — “We don’t even need to pack,” he said — or to other marinas where the city has set aside free parking for boat owners.

Mr. Wright said he has gotten used to living on the water, and storms don’t usually bother him, as their home is well protected in the marina. “I only get seasick now when boats drive by too fast and set off waves,” he said proudly, something that happens only a couple of times a year.

Many marinas hold social events. Ms. Greene and Ms. Cruz said they can’t wait for summer, when their marina has float-in movies: Someone projects a movie onto the side of their house, and residents head over on boats or other floating objects to watch it.

Pavel Kocourek, 33, a doctoral candidate in economics at New York University, decided to live on a sailboat in a marina on City Island, in the Bronx, to save on living expenses. He bought his 41-foot boat for $10,000. It has a living area, a kitchen, a bathroom, four single beds and two double beds. Now his only expense is renting the slip, which costs much less than a conventional mortgage payment on a piece of property. In the past six months, he has paid $1,400 in total.

“I could live in New York City, but I would have to commute a lot, and I would have to live in a place with no light,” he said. “I feel happier since I’ve been living on a boat.”

He relishes the peace and quiet he gets after a long day of work at his office in Greenwich Village. “Most New Yorkers have no idea this place exists,” he said. “New York can be so overwhelming, so I like that I can go into the city and have excitement and then come here and have peace.”

Of course, there are other costs to living on the water. For Mr. Kocourek, it’s the commute. New York City has few marinas in the East or Hudson Rivers for a variety of reasons — among them, that ferries run so regularly their waves would ruin docked boats. To get home, Mr. Kocourek takes the 6 train to the last stop and then boards a bus or walks for 40 minutes.

“Last night, I went to a bar, and I was out until 3 a.m., and there are no buses,” he said. “It was too cold to walk, so I had to spend money on a cab.”

There is also the space issue.

“You can’t have much stuff,” Mr. Wright said. “If you love shoes, and you have to have 100 pairs of shoes, that isn’t going to work for you, because you don’t have a place to store them.”

Some boat owners see this as a positive, though, because it forces them to live minimally.

And winter can be particularly brutal. In the River City Marina in Chicago, the water sources that boaters use to fill their tanks are turned off to prevent exposed pipes from freezing.

“There is a building next to the marina, and there is a water spigot at that building,” Mr. Wright said. “Some of the other boaters, when the weather looks decent, we will get out a series of hoses and fill up our tanks.”

To conserve water throughout the season, he and his wife often shower at the gym.

He also worries about ice and snow. The docks can get slippery during a winter storm, and wind and sleet can also cause damage to the boats if they aren’t tied up properly.

But storms generally don’t bother the couple. “We stay,” he said. “We have thunderstorms, but in the Midwest we don’t have hurricanes, so it’s not a concern.”

But winter weather is the reason Will Haduch, 29, a contestant on “The Bachelorette” who works at G.M. Hill Engineering, left his houseboat in Jersey City in September 2017 to live on land in Hoboken, N.J.

“I’d do it again in the summer any time, but the winters were tough,” Mr. Haduch said. “Being out on the water, you’re so exposed to the wind.”

Another disadvantage is that houseboats don’t appreciate the way conventional houses on land do, said Skylar Olsen, the director of economic research at Zillow.

“When we think about home buying as an investment, the investment part generally comes from the increasing value of the land,” Ms. Olsen said. “As cities fill up, land with good access to amenities and jobs becomes more scarce, and the value of the home increases. So a houseboat — where you own the house itself, but rent the slip where the house is docked — doesn’t make a good long-term investment.”

The financial value of a boat often isn’t enough to be meaningful, said Chris Mitchell, 50, who owns a foreign-currency exchange business and lives on a boat in Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City. There is a great deal of wear-and-tear on boats, he noted, and older models are generally replaced by shiny new ones: “Boats depreciate. That’s all there is to it.”

But money isn’t everything. Living on the water has other, intangible benefits — one being that it brings you very close to nature.

Recently, Ms. Greene and Ms. Cruz noticed that geese had built a nest on their pier and laid some eggs. “They are our neighbors,” Ms. Cruz marveled. “How amazing is that.”

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.

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[legit-scam-review]

How Hackers Stole Millions Worth of Crypto Via Victim’s Telecoms Operator

On Aug. 15, American investor Michael Terpin filed a $224 million lawsuit against AT&T. He believes that the telecoms giant had provided hackers with access to his phone number, which led to a major crypto heist.

Michael Terpin is a Puerto Rico-based entrepreneur and CEO of TransformGroup. He is also a co-founder of an angel group for Bitcoin (BTC) investors named BitAngels and of a digital currency fund, the BitAngels DApps Fund.

Terpin claims that he lost $24 million worth of cryptocurrencies as a result of two hacks that occured over the course of seven months: The 69-page complaint he filed with California law firm Greenberg Glusker mentions two seperate episodes, dated June 11, 2017 and Jan. 7, 2018. In both cases, as per the document, AT&T, of which Terpin was a longtime subscriber since the 1990s, failed to protect his digital identity.

Now, Terpin is seeking $200 million in punitive damages and $24 million in compensation from the telecommunications corporation.

SIM swapping scam: What does a telecoms provider have to do with crypto savings?

“What AT&T did was like a hotel giving a thief with a fake ID a room key and a key to the room safe to steal jewelry in the safe from the rightful owner,” the complaint states, arguing that Terpin fell victim to a SIM swap fraud, also known as SIM hijacking or a “port out scam.”

SIM swapping is a process of leading a telecoms provider like, say, T-Mobile transferring the target’s phone number to a SIM card held by the attacker. Once they receive the phone number, hackers can use it to reset the victims’ passwords and break into their accounts, including accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges.

Occasionally, that allows thieves to bypass even two-factor authentication, as Motherboard writes. According to their investigation, SIM swapping “is relatively easy to pull off and has become widespread,” adding that “cryptocurrency accounts are common targets.”

The tactics employed by criminals to perform such hacks may vary. Sometimes, they trick customer representatives into believing they are the targets and make them hand over their data. However, as per Motherboard, fraudsters often use the so-called “plugs”: telecom company insiders who get paid to do illegal swaps. An anonymous SIM hijacker told the publication:

“Everyone uses them[…] When you tell someone [who works at a telecoms company] they can make money, they do it.”

An anonymous source at Verizon told Motherboard that he had been approached via Reddit, where he was offered bribes in exchange for SIM swaps. Another Verizon employee claimed that the hacker promised that they would make “$100,000 in a few months” if he would cooperate — all he had to do is “either activate the SIM cards for [the hacker] when [he was] at work or give [the attacker his] Employee ID and PIN.”

More related to the Terpin case, Motherboard’s dialogue with an AT&T employee suggested that their system’s design reportedly allows some employees to supersede security features, such as the phone passcode that AT&T requires when porting numbers:

“From there, the passcode can be changed[…] With a fresh passcode, the number can be ported out with no hang ups.”

How was Terpin hacked?

As mentioned above, Terpin was hacked twice: in June 2017 and in January 2018.

First, in the summer of 2017, he found out that his AT&T number had been hacked when his phone suddenly went dead, according to the complaint. He then learned from AT&T that his password had been changed remotely “after 11 attempts in AT&T stores had failed.”

After gaining access to Terpin’s phone, the attackers used his personal information, including calls and text messages, to break into his accounts that use telephone numbers as a means of verification, including his “cryptocurrency accounts” — although it doesn’t specify the type of those accounts. The hackers also reportedly hijacked Terpin’s Skype account to impersonate him and convince one of his clients to send them cryptocurrency.

AT&T reportedly cut off access to the hackers only after they managed to steal “substantial funds” from Terpin. The document also states that after the incident, on June 13, 2017, Terpin met with AT&T representatives to discuss the attack and was promised by AT&T that his account would be moved to a “higher security level” with “special protection,” akin to the ones used by celebrities:

“AT&T further told Mr. Terpin that the implementation of the increased security measures would prevent Mr. Terpin’s number from being moved to another phone without Mr. Terpin’s explicit permission, because no one other than Mr. Terpin and his wife would know the secret code.”

Nevertheless, half a year later, on Saturday, Jan. 7, 2018, Teprin’s phone reportedly turned off again — he got attacked yet another time. The complaint claims that “an employee in an AT&T store cooperated with an imposter committing SIM swap fraud,” despite extra security measures being taken back in June 2017:

“As AT&T later admitted, an employee in an AT&T store in Norwich, Connecticut ported over Mr. Terpin’s wireless number to an imposter in violation of AT&T’s commitments and promises, including the higher security that it had supposedly placed on Mr. Terpin’s account after the June 11, 2017 hack that had supposedly been implemented to prevent precisely such fraud.”

This time the thieves allegedly stole about $24 million worth of cryptocurrency, even though he tried to contact AT&T “instantly” after his phone stopped working. AT&T allegedly “ignored” his request, leaving the hackers enough time to get enough information about Terpin’s crypto accounts to move his funds to their own accounts. The plaintiff complaint argues that Terpin’s wife also tried calling AT&T at the time, but was put on “endless hold” when she asked to be connected to AT&T’s fraud department.

The Teprin case could be a legal precedent for SIM swapping scams

As the complaint sums up, emphasising the potential scale of port out scams:

“AT&T is doing nothing to protect its almost 140 million customers from SIM card fraud. AT&T is therefore directly culpable for these attacks because it is well aware that its customers are subject to SIM swap fraud and that its security measures are ineffective. AT&T does virtually nothing to protect its customers from such fraud because it has become too big to care.”

When Gizmodo contacted AT&T for a comment on the story, the company reportedly denied the accusation, stating that they are ready to stand their ground:

“We dispute these allegations and look forward to presenting our case in court.”

Terpin told Gizmodo that such crypto heists are commonly performed by “college kids who go online in these Discord groups.” He also insisted that in his case, the thieves used an AT&T employee:

“The one thing that’s been a link between [the crypto hacks] is that in every case they’ve had an insider[…] [Trading cryptocurrencies] is safe as long as nobody gives out your digital identity.”

He added that he contacted the FBI, Homeland Security and the U.S. Secret Service, and they’ve identified the AT&T employee who allegedly participated in the attack.

Terpin also claimed that he doesn’t give out his phone number anymore, relying on Google Voice instead.

Cointelegraph has contacted Terpin’s lawyers to specify which tokens were stolen from him, and where he had his cryptocurrency account. This story will be updated as soon as the comment request gets returned.

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[cubaverdad]

The Cuban hustle - Doctors drive cabs and work abroad to make up for meager pay

The Cuban hustle: Doctors drive cabs and work abroad to make up for meager pay By ROB WATERS FEBRUARY 8, 2017 HAVANA — He knew as a child that he wanted to be a doctor, like his father. He went to medical school, became a general surgeon and ultimately a heart specialist. He practiced at Cuba's premier cardiovascular hospital, performed heart transplants, and published articles in medical journals. For this, Roberto Mejides earned a typical doctor's salary: about $40 a month. It wasn't nearly enough, even with the free housing and health care available to Cubans, to support his extended family. So in 2014, Mejides left them behind, moving to Ecuador to earn up to $8,000 a month working at two clinics and performing surgeries. It's a common story here, where waiters, cabdrivers, and tour guides can make 10 to 20 times the government wages of doctors and nurses — thanks to tips from tourists. "Doctors are like slaves for our society," said Sandra, an art student and photographer's assistant who makes more than her mother, a physician. "It's not fair to study for so many years and be so underpaid." Cuba is proud of its government-run health care system and its skilled doctors. But even with a raise two years ago, the highest paid doctors make $67 a month, while nurses top out at $40. That leaves many feeling demoralized — and searching for ways to improve their lives. Some enter the private economy — by renting rooms to tourists, driving cabs, or treating private patients, quasi-legally, on the side. Thousands of others accept two-year government assignments to work as doctors abroad, collecting higher salaries for themselves and earning billions for the state, which helps keep the stagnant economy afloat. In fact, health workers are Cuba's largest source of foreign exchange. A few doctors, like Mejides, arrange foreign employment on their own, putting at risk their future ability to return to a government job in the health system back home. "It's hard to migrate and be alone," Mejides said in Spanish, during a video phone call from Ecuador to a reporter visiting Havana in October. "It's stressful. I am in the wrong place. I should be with my family in my country, working and being rewarded properly." Still, with his Ecuador earnings, he was able to buy his wife, two daughters, and two stepdaughters a $23,000 apartment in Havana, and he sends them $300 to $500 a month. Renting out rooms to make ends meet While doctors back in Cuba grumble about their low pay, they usually find ways to make do. Sandra's mother, Nadia, a genetics researcher, earns about as much as she pays a cleaning woman to maintain her three-bedroom Havana apartment. Whenever she can, she rents one of those rooms to tourists for $40 a night, making more in two nights than she does from her monthly earnings as a doctor. She asked that her full name not be used to avoid any problems with the government. The rental income allows Nadia to have a modestly comfortable life and to be able to buy fruits and vegetables at farmers markets. But a restaurant meal is a rare treat, and traveling abroad is impossible. Still, she loves her work and the intellectual challenge of her research into genetic diseases. She said many Cuban doctors are committed and provide excellent service, in part because of the ways they have learned to overcome shortages of equipment and technology. "We don't have all the electronic tools, so we have to learn to do things other ways, to diagnose just by external examination," she said, over a dinner of fish and rum at her apartment. She'd like to earn more money, of course, and she understands why so many doctors, including many she knows, have chosen to leave Cuba. "I'm not ambitious for money," she said. "I get rent from visitors, and I get to live in Cuba. I have a nice house, and I'm happy with what I have. But I'm not a millionaire." Cecilia, a 60-year-old former nurse who also asked that her full name not be used, spent 25 years working in government hospitals and clinics. To adapt to the shortages, she learned to make inventos medicos — medical inventions — using a chair or bench to raise the back of a patient's bed, for example, or cutting the tip off an intravenous line to fashion an oxygen feed to a patient's nose. But she became disillusioned by the chronic shortages and the stress she saw in both her patients and colleagues. "The material scarcity is so overwhelming that it keeps people from dedicating all the passion, love, and brain power that they should to their patients in need," she said, sitting in a rocking chair in her third-floor Havana apartment. "I was the one who had to face the patients and tell them we don't have the drug that you need. It was very common. And I didn't want to do that any more." Doctors and nurses "have the best intentions, but they face so many obstacles, there are so many things on their mind," she added. "The doctor might be treating a patient but they are actually thinking: 'When I get home, at God knows what time, what am I going to feed my kid?'" She quit nursing in the early 2000s and later began to pursue her passion, doing hands-on alternative medicine that combines techniques of massage, kinesiology, magnetic therapy, and so-called floral therapy, which uses extracts of flowers and herbs as healing agents. Her work with private clients, who come to her apartment, is permitted under a license for massage, the only form of healing work included on a list of government-approved private services and businesses. Working three days a week, she earns almost $120 a month "if all my appointments show up," she said. "I use to make that in six months working at the hospital." A surplus of doctors In the years after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, Cuba invested heavily in education and science, training tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, and scientists. As a result, Cuba, a country of 11.2 million people, today has 90,000 doctors, the most per capita in the world. About 25,000 of these doctors, along with 30,000 Cuban nurses and other health professionals, are working in 67 countries around the world. They earn about $8.2 billion in revenue for the government, according to a recent article in Granma, the official paper of the Cuban Communist Party. The bulk of the doctors, about 20,000, are in Brazil and Venezuela. Over the last three years they provided treatment to 60 million Brazilians, mostly the rural poor, said Cristián Morales Fuhrimann, the Pan American Health Organization's representative in Havana. Cuba receives about $5,000 a month per doctor from Brazil, pays each doctor about $1,200, and banks the rest, said John Kirk, a professor of Latin American studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who has researched Cuba's program of medical missions. Most of the doctors' shares are deposited in their Cuban bank accounts, requiring them to return home to collect it. "Cuba has too many doctors, so their main source of hard currency is to rent out medical services," Kirk said. Once close allies of Havana, Brazil and Venezuela have been engulfed in political and economic crises that will cause them to reduce their use of Cuban doctors in the coming years. That may lead Cuba to redeploy some doctors to other parts of the world, including the Middle East. In Qatar, an oil-rich emirate about as far from Cuba geographically and culturally as any place in the world, the so-called Cuban Hospital is fully staffed by 400 Cuban doctors, nurses, and technicians. Cuba's dispatch of doctors not only generates revenue, it is also an exercise in soft power that allows the country to spread its influence around the globe. "It's a major contribution to the health of the world," said Morales. "They made a big difference in fighting Ebola in Africa, in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti." Some Cuban doctors working overseas have defected to the United States, aided by a policy launched during the administration of George W. Bush that permitted Cuban medical personnel to go to the US with their spouses and children. In its last weeks in office, the Obama administration announced it was ending the program. Since the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program began in 2006, more than 9,000 medical professionals and their family members were approved for admission to the US. In the past four years, the number of entrants spiked, reaching almost 2,000 for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The Cuban government and the Pan American Health Organization protested the policy as a form of poaching that undermined Cuba's health system and impeded newfound cooperation between the US and Cuba. In a statement, Obama acknowledged that the program "risks harming the Cuban people." Cuban doctors are in demand internationally because they come cheap, are well-trained, and work in a public health system that is highly organized and well-run. In Cuba, primary care clinics are available in every neighborhood. Specialists in cancer, immunology, genetic medicine, and cardiovascular disease staff the hospitals. Life expectancy rates, which two generations ago were at Third World levels, are today roughly equal to those in the United States. But the absence of so many doctors also provokes complaints from patients, who say it keeps them from getting the best care. They also grouse that they have to bring their own food and bedsheets, wait for appointments or medications — and provide gifts to doctors to ensure good treatment. When the 61-year-old father of Concepcion, a young Cuban professional, was diagnosed with prostate cancer last summer, she used personal connections to enable her father to see a specialist promptly. Concepcion, who asked that her full name not be used to avoid reprisals or damage to her professional standing, also provided daily gifts of food, cosmetics, and sometimes cash to doctors, nurses, and technicians while her father was hospitalized for a month in Holguin, a city in eastern Cuba. "Doctors are used to receiving gifts," she said. "You give the gift and the attention starts getting better. If you stop and the attention goes down, you go back to handing out gifts. You feel sorry for the doctors because they work really hard under bad conditions and you always feel like they're not being rewarded." She estimated she spent about $500 on gifts and food, an amount she said would have doubled had he been hospitalized in pricier Havana. Jose dos Santos, a Cuban journalist who needs regular treatment for his diabetes, said the care he receives is excellent. Bringing gifts to doctors "has become a habit because we know that the job doctors do needs to be better rewarded," he said. "We don't produce oil," he added, "but we produce talent, and it makes sense that that talent is acknowledged and rewarded." In December, Roberto Mejides moved again, this time to Merida, Mexico, where he plans to work for the next four years. His income will be roughly the same as in Ecuador, but now he's just 90 minutes by air from Havana. He hopes to bring his family to join him in the coming months, "My hopes have always been the same, to work honestly and to provide my family with an adequate life," he said. Someday, he added, he wants to return to Cuba: "It's my country, my homeland." Rob Waters can be reached at robwaters@pacbell.net Follow Rob on Twitter @robwaters001 Source: Cuban doctors drive cabs and work abroad to compensate for meager pay - http://ift.tt/2lq478j via Blogger http://ift.tt/2k3w3Nz