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Practices of double currency: value and politics in rural Cuba

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Abstract

Ethnographies of contemporary Cuba often employ the concept of “struggle” to describe everyday economic action. This concept, however, lacks the edge to analyze social contests around value and the resulting structural differentiation of the social field. Inspired by anthropological debates on value and fieldwork observations in rural western Cuba, this paper begins to explore the social life of Cuba’s monetary plurality. I reconstruct and interpret some of the major features of the Cuban monetary landscape, namely, the existence of two main national currencies and exchange rates, different institutional rules for accountancy, and the awkward intimacy with the US dollar. The analysis of the national monetary system reveals the contrapuntal and historically contingent formation of an architecture of value based on a sphere of contained reproduction and a sphere of external reconnection. Additionally, paying attention to the money medium leads me to notice the politics involved in negotiating a dimension of incalculability interwoven in the functioning of the economy at large. The analysis of individuals’ and state actors’ everyday economic practices in this context provides a favorable vantage point from which to consider how particular economic operations take part into broader processes of accumulation and loss of value.

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Notes

  1. Raul refers to Raul Castro, Fidel’s younger brother, “historical” leader of the Cuban Revolution, and president of the country in the period 2008–2018. My conversation with Mario took place weeks after Miguel Diaz-Canel had replaced Raul as head of State—a fact that Mario was fully aware of, but disregarded in this passage.

  2. It is worth noting that a version of the thesis of struggle accommodates the anti-Castro politics of the Miami-based Cuban exile. As De La Torre (2003) argues, there is indeed an exile struggle—a local “political religion” that conceives the expat community as the reservoir of the true essence of the nation that must necessarily antagonize the regime in Havana.

  3. These social welfare programs are indeed not only oriented to the day-to-day business of maintaining a measure of social justice, but are also integral to the upkeep of Cuba’s independence as it’s understood in the context of the one party system. Often articulated by leaders such as the late Fidel Castro and other organic intellectuals of the Revolution, this point of view argues that preventing significant class divisions and therefore preserving objective conditions for the unity of the people is tantamount to protecting national sovereignty. As the argument runs, an internally divided Cuba would easily fall back into subordination to stronger powers like the USA. This idea goes back to Cuba’s nineteenth century hero José Martí, and is central to official discourses in which positive notions about unity, social justice, sovereignty, and one-party system cement and justify each other.

  4. My intervention in this issue resonates with previous debates about the role of money, economic calculation, planning, and questions of value and profits in state enterprises, carried out by some of the more theoretically oriented leaders of the Revolution, particularly Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and other academics and advisors in the mid-1960s (Tablada 1990; Guevara 2006; Yaffe 2009).

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Acknowledgments

I thank my supervisor Dr. Lindsay Dubois, two anonymous reviewers, and Dr. Liesl Gambold for their criticism and help in previous versions of this article. My research and writing has been possible thanks to funding by Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships, Killam Predoctoral Scholarships, Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarships, and Dalhousie University.

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  1. Doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology. Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, Room 1128, 6135 University Avenue, PO Box 15000, Halifax, NS, B3H 4R2, Canada

    Daniel Salas

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Salas, D. Practices of double currency: value and politics in rural Cuba. Dialect Anthropol 45, 47–63 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09566-1

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