“What does UNEAC do,” I asked, “if an artist gets in trouble with the government?” “If he is right, we will help him out. And if he is not right, we will help orient him in the correct direction,” said Professor Dr. Loyola with a perfectly straight face. Since 1959 the Cuban government has been “orienting” everybody in “the correct direction,” thereby making a total mess of the Cuban economy. And one of the things that’s so messy about it is that there’s no way to measure how messy it is. There are simply no reliable Cuban economic statistics. Perhaps one of the things that keeps Sweden from turning into Cuba is that, when it comes to publishing honest reports about everything government is doing, the Swedes can’t stop themselves. The Cubans have resisted this temptation. The Cuban government realizes that it has no motive to tell the truth about economic conditions, even to itself. And as for measuring Cuba’s black-market economy, criminals don’t issue annual reports. Everybody, Cuban officialdom included, agrees that Cuba’s economy has shrunk by at least a third since the 1980s. But a third of what? Cuba’s per-capita gross domestic product for the year 1995, for example, has been calculated at $2,058 by dissident Cuban economists, $2,902 by the Cuban government, $3,245 by wishful-thinking pinko American academics and—the highest estimate of all— $3,652 by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Now the per-capita GDP in Cuba is about $1,200, according to the National Bank of Cuba, or $1,480, if you believe the CIA, while the Columbia Journal of World Business thinks the figure may be as low as $900. Nobody knows. Just as nobody knows what the peso is worth. The official exchange rate for the peso is the same as that for the new peso convertible: one peso equals one dollar. Not even the Cuban government pretends to believe this. The black-market rate in March 1996 was 21 pesos per dollar. But there was something wrong with that also. Just two years before, the rate was 150 pesos per dollar. And dollars hadn’t gotten any less necessary or much more available. Latin-American scholar Douglas W. Payne thinks the Cuban secret police took over the black market. Or maybe the Cuban
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