Havana Hustle

Cuba's New Socialist Man learns to wheel and deal

Damien Cave from the August/September 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

It's an ongoing process. When we walked out of his neighborhood, Pablo was stopped several times for help. One man, with a weathered face and torn jeans, requested a pair of shoes; another asked when Pablo was going to teach him English.

I've seen this communal approach to commerce throughout Cuba, especially among independent workers such as the repairman who silenced my noisy air conditioner with the help of two apprentices. It could be a pleasant aftertaste of Cuban socialism. Or perhaps it's an example of the solidarity that develops among citizens of a decaying authoritarian state. Regardless, I couldn't help but feel encouraged by the team effort. In these connections and webs of support, I saw future community-focused businesses: an English language school here, a construction company there.

But will it ever happen?

Sex, Drugs, and Rule of Law

The entrepreneurial and hustling scene in Cuba changes with the speed of a thunderstorm. Researchers like CUNY's Henken have shown that Cubans rarely cease engaging in commerce when the government acts, choosing instead to route around the problem with innovative adjustments. Some of these are relatively harmless. The commission system, for example, is a way to ensure payment for an illegal but often necessary task. Other shifts, however, do not bode well.

When I visited in December 2002, for example, sex and drugs were being sold more openly than during my previous visit, a year earlier. Prostitution in Cuba is nothing new, of course, but in the past such transactions were usually initiated without pimps. Not anymore. I discovered this first on the tourist Fifth Avenue of Obispo Street, when a short, thirtyish man offered me his teenage sister for $15 a night. Then I saw the hustlers on the Prado hawking the women who sat beside them. Finally there was the jinetero in the seemingly new Polo shirt -- he looked about 18 years old -- who brought me to a smoke-filled room on the second floor of a decayed colonial building in Old Havana. There, for only $10, I could gain access to loud music and 100 women who ogled me like I was pure gold when I peeked inside.

Drugs remain a far less developed market. Hustlers who rub their nose to signify sales of cocaine remain rare, and marijuana offers are not much more common. In fact, when I refused to buy a joint from one Tommy Hilfiger-clad hustler in central Havana, he badgered me for prices. "How much should I charge?" he asked. "What's a joint cost in the U.S.?"

Still, the emergence of even clueless drug dealers is hardly cause for celebration. When illegal, drugs tend to breed violence. As Dennis Hays, executive vice president at the Cuban American National Foundation, points out, "It's a very short step into crime -- muggings, flimflam, rolling people, pickpocketing."

The present crackdown, Hays and others argue, will only accelerate the process. Already, says Henken, "A lot of people are going underground and are being forced into more pernicious activity because there's not much space to survive."

With characteristic Cuban pride, the jineteros disagree. They tend to see themselves as the country's future business leaders. They know they will outlive Fidel, and many -- like Manuel, a 20-year-old law student who's aiming for a career in international commerce -- are preparing for the imminent transition to capitalism. And don't worry about violence, a scraggly-bearded hustler on the Malecon told me in May. After all, he said, "Cubans are not terrorists." The only people who died in the spring spate of hijackings "were killed by el gobierno."

But even if crime remains under control, the government's restrictive approach to capitalism will likely inflict more subtle but still painful wounds. Scholars, though quick to point out that no scientific study has captured jineterismo's true impact, tend to be pessimistic about Cuba's informal markets. They argue that the most troubling portents are not physical but cultural.

"It's important to recognize that the problems communist countries have is a lack of rule of law," says economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former vice president at the World Bank and the author of Globalization and Its Discontents. "This is the inheritance of communism."

Cuba is no exception, and according to some, jineteros will only make future chaos more difficult to avoid. "The jineteros could not function without the theft that takes place from the enterprises that are owned directly or indirectly by the state," says Nelson Valdes, a Cuba-focused sociologist at Duke. "Thus, the jineteros are hardly a positive force for economic enterprise or labor discipline."

The short-term nature of tourism -- combined with laws prohibiting capital investment and rhetoric that treats tourism as a temporary bandage that will soon be discarded -- teaches jineteros to ignore the value of long-term economic relationships. "Every tourist that walks down the street is someone who you're hoping to use for an evening at most," Hays says. "It's a dog-eat-dog capitalism. It's not Junior Achievement in action."

CUNY's Henken, who has conducted more field research on jineterismo than just about anyone, takes a more balanced view. People like Pablo play a positive role, he says, by providing for their families and creating an alternative to the state-run system. But the benefits may be only temporary. Now more than ever, Henken says, Castro is turning "a reservoir of entrepreneurial talent" into "a swamp of corruption."