Insights Into How Cuba's Economy Works

Cuba is a place where the structure of working life has been turned upside down. Whereas ambitious young Americans push to become doctors, lawyers, and architects, in Cuba the situation is completely reversed. Professionals are at the bottom of the economic totem pole, earning $10 to $30 a month. (Imagine, trial lawyers and surgeons making a dollar a day!) Menial service providers are the nation's entrepreneurs, at the top of the economic ladder, earning hundreds, and sometimes thousands of dollars a month.

In a desperate effort to turn its terribly depressed economy around during the early 1990s in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, Cuba began focusing heavily on tourism. It restored dozens of crumbling buildings in historic Old Havana and transformed them into first-class hotels and attractive restaurants. It promoted tourism to audiences in Canada, Europe, and the rest of the world outside the U.S. And it shrewdly made legal the American dollar, allowing its arch enemy's currency, flowing via Miami expatriates and international tourism, to turn things around.

Today, tourism accounts for about 60 percent of the country's "exports." In the process, though, Cuba's supposedly classless society now consists of two classes: the destitute class, including many professionals, who rely on Cuba's nearly worthless pesos, and the entrepreneurial class, which works in Cuba's tourist industry, earning the dollars that make the wheels go round. The most enterprising Cubans find a way to work with tourists, and acquire dollars via tips. Bellhops, waiters, hotel maids, tourist guides, and street musicians earn anywhere from $150 to $1,500 a month from tourists, astronomical sums in a country where the typical salary is $20.

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