The Cuban Economic Condition--The Abyss is not an Empty Space

 

Pix Credit here

Cuba is the gift that keeps on giving--if what one is looking for are stories of living on the edge of an abyss. But this an abyss within the body of the collective--one that exposes not just its empty spaces but also what is used to fill it.

So first to the abyss: as a formal matter the Cuban economic system is again near collapse.  Thsi time it is evidenced (as it has been for some time) by the worth of its currency. "The Cuban peso was trading on the informal market at an all-time low of 230 to the dollar on Wednesday, slumping to half its value a year ago as consumers struggle with surging inflation and scarce goods, a widely watched tracker showed." (Cubans struggle as peso loses half its value in a year on informal market).

"The fall of the Cuban currency reflects the slow-motion collapse of the island’s productive economy," said Bert Hoffman, a Latin America expert at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg. Cuban economists said the peso's plunge reflects a deepening four-year-old crisis in the Communist-run country that has been driven by a lack of convertible foreign currency and falling production. . . The currency's decline has been accompanied by shortages of food, medicine and other basic goods and long lines appear when they are available. (Ibid.).

All of this is true. Without a doubt.  The formal economy, and its structure and ideology is continuing to be consumed by the inevitable workings of its principal contradictions. It survives only because it is in the interest of other states to permit it to survive, with just enough aid to prevent collapse but not to escape dependency.  Cuba is a dependent state precisely because it finds the current state of dependency valuable. 

But formality has never been a strong suit of the Cuban state. It is what lies beneath rather than the thin but glossy exterior that is far more worthy of study.  The informal sale of everything from eggs to car parts — the country's so-called black market — is a time-honored practice in crisis-stricken Cuba, where access to the most basic items such as milk, chicken, medicine and cleaning products has always been limited. The market is technically illegal, but the extent of illegality, in official eyes, can vary by the sort of items sold and how they were obtained.  Before the internet, such exchanges took place "through your contacts, your neighbors, your local community," said Ricardo Torres, a Cuban and economics fellow at American University in Washington. "But now, through the internet, you get to reach out to an entire province."  With shortages and economic turmoil at the worst they've been in years, the online marketplace "has exploded," Torres said.  Bustling WhatsApp groups discuss the informal exchange rate, which provides more pesos per dollar or euro than the official bank rate. (Cuba's Informal Market Finds New Space on Growing Internet).

Cuba survives because there are two Cubas. 

There is the glossy public and official Cuba that elites love to love or hate. That is the only Cuba that is taken at face value. That is the Cuba against which what are now a generation's worth of implausible reporting has helped produce some sort of narrative that is taken the the entirety of the nation. This is the Cuba of ideology, of spectacle, of visits (sometime quite pathetic) of foreign dignitaries, public intellectuals, and others who are as interested in their home audiences as they may be in the theater stage that Cuba tends to be for them.  

And then there is the informal and popular Cuba. This is the Cuba of the streets and back alleys.  This is the Cuba of informal economies, of unofficial networks, of bartering, and of pragmatic approaches to the problems of everyday life. In this Cuba the state is something that exists, that may sometimes be of value, that must be feared, respected and avoided,  and that, beyond that may be less relevant for daily life . One pays one's respects to the state and its apparatus, the way one paid respect to the parish priest a century agao.  One confesses, appears at all sites of ritual and performance and one  embraces whatever may be necessary to get by.  And then one turns one's attention to the arts of living.Some of this is embedded in the so-called non-state sector.  Some of it is tolerated; some of it only when convenient.  Virtually nobody in the public sector is insulated from the informal state--from bartering and other transactions that sidestep both the formal economy and its record keeping.  

It is convenient to speak to or of either Cuba. It makes more sense to understand them as an inseparable whole.  Only then--when Cuba is approached not as a bifurcated and separated entity at war with itself, but as an intimately connected and interactive whole--will it be possible to develop a more coherent and relevant analysis.  Until then, all one can expect is the narratives of pre-conceptions. . . or desire.