Cubans Line Up for Cell Phone Service

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 centers 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 cell phone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba's government limited access to cell phones 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 older 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 neighborhood of Miramar, meanwhile, the line split in two and snaked off in different directions.