government was using the convertible peso—which, though printed in bright tropical hues, is essentially counterfeit U.S. money—to flood the currency exchanges. Odd things can happen when the government is more corrupt than you are. The real answer to the exchange-rate conundrum may be that there is no exchange rate. Only a lunatic would trade a U.S. dollar for anything the Cuban government prints, except exit visas. “There will arrive the day when money will have no value,” Fidel Castro once said in a fit of marxist utopianism. But apparently he meant it. More was to be gleaned by looking around in Cuba than by trying to do imaginary math. I went into the Ministry of Trade’s product showroom, and there, offered for wholesale export to the world, were coconut shells painted to look like turtles, baskets that seemed to have been woven by people wearing catcher’s mitts, posters for obscure brands of rum, pictures of Che Guevara, and Aunt Jemima rag dolls in half a dozen sizes. The Cubans may not be good with their hands, but they’re very skillful with blame. They blame the Soviet Union. And not without reason. When the Soviet bloc collapsed, the Cubans lost somewhere between $4 billion and $6 billion a year in grants, subsidies, and trade concessions. Taking the low figure, that’s a dollar per person per day for everyone in the country. You can live for less than that in Cuba, and almost everyone has to. Of course, the Soviets got something in return for this aid. They got sugar and cobalt and nickel. Which is why it was always easy to get a plate of sugared cobalt and nickel at Moscow restaurants in the 1980s. Plus, the Soviets got to be a huge pain in the ass to the United States. But what the Cuban government got was the luxury of perfect shiftlessness. The Castro government took boatloads of money from the Soviet Union and took all the businesses, industries, and land in Cuba, too. Sweden may be borrowing prosperity, but Cuba tried to beg and steal it. So the Soviet Union is to blame for Cuban poverty because the Soviet Union fell apart, which means that everything is really America’s fault. Everything usually is. Cubans have been blaming their troubles on the United States at least since independence in 1902 and probably since Columbus set course too far south and missed becoming an American citizen. Even as José Marti was leading the struggle for freedom from Spain, he was denouncing the United States as a “monster.” And he was living in the United States at the time. My tour guide Roberto told me that the explosion of the battleship Maine was
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online