Charlie Larga’s Field Guide to Life in Cuenca: The taxi driver, the subsidy, and the house on the line

It’s one of those mild Cuenca afternoons when the rain has decided to wait politely in the wings. I mount the back seat of a Hyundai Creta, one of those compact SUVs that tries to look muscular, but still has the heart and soul of a weak and feeble hatchback.

My driver is chatty in that way Cuenca taxistas sometimes are, especially if there’s a story to tell and a passenger willing to listen.

“This one’s new,” I say, admiring the still-shiny and pleasantly spacious interior.

“Three months,” he replies, with a certain pride. The shine, however, comes with a price: seven hundred dollars a month to the bank.

I ask the obvious question — how much does he make from driving? His answer lands like a stone in a pond: about fifty dollars for a twelve-hour shift. That’s fractionally over four dollars an hour, and that’s before you think about tires, oil changes, brake pads, and the occasional passenger who pays with a counterfeit bill.

“What about insurance?” I ask, expecting at least the basic coverage.

“Don’t have it.”

And here’s where my eyebrows head north. No insurance? Surely the bank, having lent him tens of thousands, would insist?

“No,” he says. “But they do need a guarantee. You promise you’ll repay, even if it means selling your house. Or you have someone stand for you.” He tells me he once nearly lost his home after acting as guarantor for a relative.

It’s the kind of arrangement that would make a New York banker choke on his Starbucks latte. Yet here it’s just another day in the high-trust, high-risk world of Ecuadorian personal finance.

We move on to fuel prices, because in Cuenca, taxi drivers have as much to say on that subject as meteorologists do about the weather.

He’s heard the government promised to subsidize fuel for taxis after cutting the general subsidy in mid-2024 — but says it was all lies. In truth, the compensation scheme did exist: taxis could get the equivalent of about forty dollars a month to offset the higher fuel price. But they had to register online, and only about one in five drivers in Cuenca managed to complete the process before the deadline. Technical glitches, expired paperwork, mismatched records — it was like trying to get a passport in a country where the printer is always out of ink.

So yes, there’s a subsidy, but for him, and many others, it’s the same as if it never existed. He pays full price for fuel, grinds out twelve-hour days, and sends most of it straight to the bank. Maybe he rents the car out to someone else for the other 12 hours, but I didn’t ask.

But the taxi fare does not seem to have increased since 2014, even though it is supposed to be reviewed every 2 years, so it can’t be easy to make a profit.

When I get out, he wishes me a good day and tells me to watch the six glass beer bottles in a single thin plastic bag carefully, as if the conversation had been about nothing more serious than the weather. I wish him the same, feeling slightly guilty that the $1.50 fare for my trip cost less than the coffee I’ll invest in later.

Somewhere in the background, the rain is still holding off as he hunts for his next fare.