IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 2 ENGLISH | Page 48

a bureaucracy and repressive military apparatus.
This triumvirate defines the group that has been
controlling the country for more than fifty years.
What remains is the enormous hunting ground
this group has declared open for itself, and illegal
for the unauthorized masses.
However, human nature refused to have its spirit
deformed. The result is what became stealthily
deformed. Scruples like honesty, ethics, morality
and sincerity were abandoned by a large part of
society. It saw them as an impediment to swimming in totalitarianism’s turbulent waters. A definitive blow to this downward spiral was the exclusion of the U.S. dollar as a common currency,
and its replacement with the State’s convertible
currency (CUC), which was devoid of any backing, but enjoyed a decreed and arbitrary exchange
rate with real convertible currencies. The specific
objective of this plan was to hoard all of the population’s dollars, which it held as real capital, and
reduce to a minimum any possibility of a growing
and incipient middle class. The State would no
longer need to offer more and more goods and
services to get those dollars into its coffers: it automatically came by them and replaced them by
giving little colored papers to the population for
its acquisition of goods and services. The calculated difference in this situation was that it no
longer had to worry about providing and offering
them in a way effective and increasing enough to
get those enemy dollars from those who received
them from exiles in the United States.
Nevertheless, ever since the practice of using
more than one currency2 was instituted in our supposedly egalitarian economy, which depreciated
the national currency our people earn by working,
the effect of this policy on the majority of Cubans
was the underground equivalent of an atomic
bomb being tested in the Mojave Desert.

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Suddenly, the value of work was depreciated and
personal rations were measured according to the
official exchange rate. Despite the fact the smartest of those in power knew that not everyone
would obey the order to submit to this monetary
arrangement—to the detriment of his or her own,
personal goals—it did know it had the repressive
capacity and centralized mechanisms of control to
contain them. The one thing it did not foresee was
that this unruly bunch would grow to an unpredicted size and even escape its grasp.
The ambition and inalienable desire for growing
wellbeing, and even grotesque opulence, were so
strong that these measures produced a bastard
child: a black market not under totalitarian control, one that had already combined and mixed up
followers from both camps (the State’s and society’s), as well as the limits of the influence of
those who could control them. Examples abound
everywhere, from corrupt functionaries at all levels—some government authorized, others with
surreptitious ambition—to common criminals
who live in the marginal opulence of a hidden
space. There are also the individuals who do business with the State’s own goods and services
while they mask themselves by being employees
who are supposedly paid for working with these
goods and services, but use them for their own
benefit. The range of individuals like this is limitless and should be extensively researched. For
now, though, it is enough to know that this is a
contaminating tendency, an unstoppable invasion
of our malformed, feudal, State economy.
Despite all this, we must revisit the possibilities
for survival that this economic barbarity has created for most people when considering the aberrations in consumption—of even the most basic
necessities—produced by the insensitive machin-