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Monetary Chaos
and Its Social Effect
Armando Soler Hernández
Journalist
Havana, Cuba

T

he announcement of another currency
unification in Cuba has disquieted its precarious economy. This sudden ‘trumpet
blast’ from the palace has created a contradiction
for the population.
On the one hand, there is a desire for the common
currency to be for generalized use, for all manner
of supply and demand. It is currently mostly disallowed for the purchase of the most valuable
merchandise and services available on the national market. These must be purchased with the
Convertible Cuban Peso (CUC), which few people can earn in their State jobs.1 On the other
hand, there is an emerging fear concerning the unknown variety of customary traps and ambushes
those in power set as a way to govern.
According to other traumatic consequences resulting from other State economic initiatives, it
would be prudent to suspect that this financial reorganization will not offer realistic solutions to
long term, insurmountable obstacles like low
productivity and rampant inflation. These last two
indicators are especially alarming given what we
have is a foundering economy that is never discussed at important meetings or on the national
media. Given these precedents, we cannot believe
that the process for unifying our currency that will
be implemented will be rational and equitable, in

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order to avoid more suffering on the part of a population already beaten and impoverished by imperious governing policies.
There are now formalities emerging in this extremely delayed effort to financially reorganize.
The first big one we must face to escape the economic jam we are in is the State organization’s
refusal to put its huge, monopolizing bureaucracy
on a serious economic diet. This was established
at the end of the Sixth Communist Party Congress, where it was confirmed that the State
would remain sheltered behind the inefficient and
arbitrary mechanism called ‘centralized planning,’ which has been dragging its feet on the
country’s supply and demand situation.
Thanks to this atrocious, control mechanism, and
the bizarre nature of its own internal logic, the
Cuban State has carte blanche to squander enormous amounts of money and resources from pubic funds. It spends these on a paradoxical, endless struggle to maintain already depressed levels
of public consumption. The governing class’s primary, permanent objective is to keep its rigid control over society. By its consolidating and renewed use of the blunt, organizational instrument
of a centralized economy and, of course, any real
possibility for our society to develop, it is precisely attempting to prevent this development of
practices that haven’ t come directly from the