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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

One super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I saw when I was there earlier this year.

You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy.

Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi card selling business - which is strictly illegal. I shit you not - go to a wifi park in Cuba, walk around for a bit, and a sketchy man might glance at you or secretly flash you a wifi card. You then can discretely approach him and pay him $3 (CUC) for the officially priced $2 card.

But be careful buying the card... you never know who's watching and you probably don't want to end up in Cuban jail.

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That reminds me of a funny story.

I used to live on Tehran, Iran. All restaurants, stores and businesses must be closed after 12:00 AM in Tehran.

So one night me and a friend were driving around the town in midnight and we were quite hungry. So we found a nice guy selling tea in the winter and there were other people around. We asked them if we can find food anywhere in town in this hour.

One of them gave us an address and told us we should just go there and wait in the car.

We didn't really believe, but we gave it a shot.

I kid you not. At 4:00 AM in the morning, in an alley, we stopped and a sketchy man came over and handed us a menu!

It was fast food. Pizza, burgers and chicken strips. It wasn't really good.

It was a few years ago. Nowadays there are always a few people hanging around and they sometimes open the doors and let people in.

Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer.

See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?"

The guy looked horrified and quickly blurted out "No, no, only beer! You can't get that stuff!" before moving along.

It just struck me as funny that they would dodgily sell you illegal beer but that they would be righteously indignant at weed. "That, sir, is where I draw the line of illegality!"

Maybe it's righteous indignation, or maybe they don't know your friend isn't an undercover cop.

Because alcohol laws don't tend to get enforced unless there's a problem, because most of Southern Europe operates on a "village and neighboring villages" field of view and it would be socially uncouth.

Weed on the other hand is very strictly enforced for the most part, except in more touristy and "Americanized" places.

Is the illegalization (made up a word) of weed in Europe at all a USA export as well? Or did they come to it on their own?

Hard to say. The history is murky and involve a whole mess of international conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...

Seems to be the convention that brought cannabis into the fold.

Smoking weed in Spain is legal since a couple of decades. Selling a small bag is illegal, but this isn't really enforced as it's hard to prove that the bag was for selling and not for self consuming.

Usually police will turn a blind eye both for selling pot and selling beer, unless anything goes wrong and somebody complains.

An undercover cop could also bust them for selling beer.

I've been to Barcelona as well, the beer sellers are terrible human beings. They will hover around you like flies, then one of them will put a beer down next to you in the sand. When you refuse it, he'll pick up the beer and say "Look, it has sand all over it, it's ruined now. Pay me for it." They are of South Asian like myself, and I'm sure many Indian travelers make the mistake of talking to them when the best thing to do is completely ignore them.

The next night I was ambushed by four of them in the subway, they wanted to put their number in my phone and started getting really aggressive. I smacked the shit out of two of them before a bystander intervened. If I had handed my phone to them I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten it back.

Haha! This happens at most places to tourists, some auto drivers, road side sellers in India try to rip off the tourists. It happened to me in Times Square when i first came to NYC. A guy was selling music CD's and when i was passing through him, he stopped me, handed over the CD, kinda forced me to buy which i didn't.

So across the world, it's very common the tourists get ripped off.

There are cannabis clubs all over Barcelona now, hard not to find.

There is no way those guys didn't have weed or hashish. That's what those guys in Barcelona (and the Belearics) have.

When were you in Barcelona? It's easier to find weed than cigarettes and that's not even including the social smoking clubs popping up all over the city.

All those guys, but all are selling drugs. Not only weed, in BCN it is easy to get weed semi-legally thanks to those clubs. Beer guys are in other-class-of-drugs business and if they did not sell to you it is because they did not trust in you. even police knows that but it is a controlled business. The government can't prevent drugs, instead they just observe them and keep them under control.

Are you sure it wasn't a scam to rip you off? I'm born and raised in Tehran and numerous times I had gone out for dinner passed mid-night, and I simply walked into a restaurant, ordered the food, and ate (assuming the kitchen was still open).

Specially because people in Tehran prefer to have late supper compared to North Americans, it was a lot easier to find food options late at night than say in Toronto where past mid-night the only option is fast-foods.

The law has been in place for several years now. Definitely not a scam! If you're in Tehran you can check the place out.

Email me on (my username)@gmail.com and I'll give you more detailed address if you're interested.

I doubt anything will happen to you as long as you keep things discreet.

When I was in Cuba, there were constantly people coming up to me wanting to sell cocaine/lobsters/girls/cigars. It was quite evident that you weren't going to get caught.

Some of them are quite desperate, and they're happy to do business. Interestingly, they told me they really wanted shirts. So basically be happy to swap a shirt for a box of cigars. Also branded clothes like sports jerseys seemed to be something they wanted to barter for.

I was in Cuba this January, and I didn't get the feel that this was illegal. We bought the cards on a busy street in Havanna with no problems at all. Also, we paid 2 CUC and were told the official price was 1 CUC.

I did the same last October. It's definitely illegal, only ETECSA kiosks are allowed to sell the cards. But resellers are ubiquitous and it seems that the authorities mostly turn a blind eye.

Like in all other mixed economies, EVERYTHING is illegal, but the authorities mostly turn a blind eye.

EXCEPT when they want to destroy your life or make you suffer for any reason, then they'll look at you specifically.

Make everyone a criminal so you have an excuse to get rid of those you don't like.

It's not just mixed economies:

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

US is a mixed economy too :P

The U.S. Embassy in Germany agrees with you.

>The United States is said to have a mixed economy because privately owned businesses and government both play important roles.

http://usa.usembassy.de/economy-conditions.htm

From what I saw a few times, it seemed to be pretty similar to a drug dealer standing on a street corner in a bad part of town in the US. Careful, but still kind of obvious. A couple times they made "pssst" noises to me as they showed me a card. I have no actual idea how much authorities targeted the dealings, besides seeing the level of inconspicuousness of the sales.

And in the wifi hotspots, there'll be a separate network and you pay a dude 1CUC to type in the password (access for 1hr). It's obviously not legit but it works and people get online this way.

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