Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 15

time when there is a great deal of scientific and
technical work.
Bricklaying, construction, shoe repair, driving,
dock work, auto mechanics, and carpentry are
some of the professions in which Afro-descendants are over-represented. We should not assume
by this that the Afro-descendants have been precluded from universities or the practice of certain
professions; about one-third of Afro-descendants
in Cuba are highly educated and are participating
in essential areas. What is important here is that
two-thirds of the same population remain at the
margins of these areas, and people find they have
to practice professions that support their ethnic
economy - with its inherent cyclical poverty - and
reestablish the ethnic market in the peripheral areas where it dwells. With the decline of the prevailing economic model by the end of the eighties
and early nineties, the informal economy developed significantly. We call one of its internal subdivisions the ethnic economy and market.
The ethnic market is unique within the informal
economy due to three factors: (1) It generates a
small productive industry; in other words, it is not
exclusively mercantile. (2) It functions on account of an authentic market economy in which
prices are fixed by supply and demand, and not
by the State or investors. (3) It establishes population centers in diverse places. Yet, because it is
structured from the periphery, it reproduces itself
from and within a culture of poverty. This is its
principal limitation. This poverty deepens within
an extractive model that partly depends on remittances and suffers from serious financial and
structural limitations that do not allow for social
security.
The ethnic economy and market in Cuba end up
reflecting the accumulated and structured marginality of population groups which are marginalized
by the totalitarian extractive model. What can be
expected, in the face of a political framework for
the new, authoritarian, extractive model? A fragmenting abyss is being created within our economic reality: we already see it.

It is euphemistically called the Updating of the
Cuban S ocial Model. New extractive institutions
use a tax framework to depress and repress the
ethnic market’s dynamics and capacity to produce
and reproduce the precarious wellbeing it was offering most Afro-descendants.
Many Afro-descendants who had managed to become professionals are now swelling the ranks of
the poor and aggravating the depressed ethnic
market because of the limits imposed on certain
professions regarding self-employment. Whatever knowledge they have, capable of creating incredible value-added services if only the
existence of entrepreneurs and small business
owners were allowed, is undervalued. This group
cannot use it to recreate wellbeing for historically
depressed population groups, and these Afro-descendant professionals cannot take advantage of
the different entrepreneurial activities that are
permitted because they lack the minimum starting
capital to which so many other Cubans do have
access through remittances.
In an extractive model that favors family and patrimonial capital, and in the current social restructuring, Afro-descendants are in the same position
they were during the colonial era. Even so, they
are not restrained the same way their colonial
counterparts were. Now, at a time when there are
few social guarantees that made them equal to the
rest of the population during the best years of totalitarianism’s redistribution policies, the alternative for Afro-descendants is clear: the creation of
inclusive economic institutions that allow for the
accumulation of savings, totally unfettered businesses, taking advantage of their knowledge and
investing in their ideas of how to generate social
wellbeing. This alternative is called popular capitalism and can serve to help them become middle
class. The minimal conditions are already present
in the ethnic market, and they will tend to disappear as the Cuban economy begins to take off
with some measure of certainty, once the necessary institutional reforms are made.

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