First Saturday as the World Turns

A little of the shine has worn off Pura Vida

By Ed Rogers

I have lived in Costa Rica for almost two years now. While I still love living here, I have begun to see cracks in my idea of the Costa Rican government.
    There is a lot to be said about how CAJA, the government mandated insurance, is a wonderful benefit to the people. What makes it work is everybody is required to pay into it and Social Security. The hospitals and medical care could be much better if the government made the corporations pay their back bills. There are large companies, both government-owned and private, that owe 2-3 years of back payments to CAJA for their employees.

The line moves fast at CAJA. We went for blood work recently,
got there at 6:30 and were home by 7:15

   The unions are free and able to strike often. The problem is that very few changes come about because of the strikes. They do not address the major problems that face the workers. Instead, for example, thousands of people turn out onto the street because the crazy motorcyclists don’t want a 10% increase in their insurance. They pay less than car owners and die at twice the rate.

    Costa Rica has one dock, on the East coast at Limon, through which all the goods of the country come and go. The port is old and slow. It can’t handle today’s larger cargo ships. A Dutch firm wants to build a new, up-to-date port. The port would employ many more people and increase shipments to and from Costa Rica.
    The Dutch company is not anti-union and would be more than happy to negotiate a contract. The workers at the old dock are government employees (the dock is run by the government). If the new dock is built they would no longer be employed by the government. So the fight goes on.
    While I understand that the workers feel safer with their government contract than they would feel with a contract with a foreign company, there is nothing they have now that could not be negotiated into a contract with the Dutch firm.
    The import tax makes prices here as high as and sometimes higher than in the States. The nice hotels along the beaches cost as much as you would pay in any resort in Florida. And if you’re in Florida you don’t need to come here, so you don’t have to pay the high airfare to get here.
    Locals like myself stay away from the tourist resorts. We are able to find nice hotels for $50 or $60 dollars a night, and the public beaches have everything the private resorts can offer. The beaches belong to the people of Costa Rica (to the government), so no matter what their ads say, the expensive hotels’ beaches are all public.
    When we first moved here, the colon (Costa Rica’s money) was 494 to a dollar. Today it was 540 to a dollar. This sounds great, because now we get more bang for our buck. However, the fuel prices are tied to the US dollar. This means that when the dollar goes up, so does the price of gas. Because everything moves by truck in Costa Rica, the price of everything goes up. For us it’s a wash; we can buy more colons for our dollars, but the price increase takes it back.
    The ones that really get hurt are the Costa Ricans. The prices go up, but their money stays the same.

    Big Brother is everywhere! Some of the problems are caused by outside forces. The US, in its crazy war on drugs, has made it almost impossible to invest in Central America. The paperwork to even open a checking account would fill the pages of a small novel, and it takes three to five trips to and from the bank with one- or two-hour waits.
    These things are a pain, but in Costa Rica they could get better with one election, while in the States the pigs feed from the same slop bucket, and change comes only when someone pays for it. Not that the voters here don’t vote against their best interest also. Still, I have hope for our little country and the wonderful people who live here.
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Copyright © 2014 by Ed Rogers

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