It’s the Economy, Stupid, Cuban Rafters Admit

At a new department store in the seaside suburb of Miramar--dollars only, please--Cuban shoppers browsed Tuesday along well-stocked aisles: rice cookers from China, boom boxes from Taiwan, Mexican toothpaste, Brazilian paints, Black Flag insecticide made in the United States, a Sears refrigerator for $1,117.

A child’s Mickey Mouse water toy costs $14. Inner tubes and rubber rafts were sold out, a sales clerk said with a smile.

A mile away, a young woman named Miriam nervously paced Miramar Beach as her 5-year-old splashed in the clear shallows.

“I have a degree in economics and a government salary of around 200 pesos a month. That’s less than $2, and it buys around five pounds of rice,” she said. “We can’t live on it.”

Tuesday night, Miriam, her son and six friends boarded a makeshift sailboat with a prayer and steered north through the moonlit sea.

Ask on any beach in Cuba: It is economics that is driving Cubans from their homeland.

Rafters do not talk much about politics as they await the welcoming night. No, like everybody else in Cuba, they talk about bread and butter.

The post-Cold War collapse of a stolid Marxist economy has been lately aggravated by the creation of a crazy, two-tier peso-dollar economic system. It is breeding inequality, resentment and corruption. And it is fueling the exodus toward the United States.

The long and the short of it is that Cubans with dollars--acquired legally or otherwise--get by. Cubans who live on pesos are out of luck, and they are voting masterfully with their oars, undismayed by U.S. efforts to dissuade them.

“In Cuba today there are few jobs, and jobs that pay in pesos are not worth the time it takes to do them,” said Rogelio, an articulate young mason who planned to be at sea this morning in the Florida Straits.

In the heyday of the revolution, it was illegal for a private citizen to hold dollars in Cuba. More than money, for the Fidel Castro government the dollar was the symbol of the despised Yanquis . That changed last year, when the government allowed Cubans to receive money from abroad and to hold foreign currency.

As Soviet subsidies and sweetheart deals with other formerly communist countries ended, the Cuban government’s need for foreign currency could not be slaked by its exports and the earnings from dollar-based tourism. Oil that once flowed regularly from the Soviet Union, for example, now must be purchased with dollars on the international market.

Combined with Draconian belt-tightening to save money, the government has tried to sop up dollars sent legally to Cubans by relatives abroad--up to $300 per household per quarter has been coming in--by expanding the network of dollar stores and stocking them with goods otherwise unattainable in an ever-more-rationed economy.

“Everything we sell is in dollars, but we don’t ever ask a customer where the dollars come from. As employees of the state, we, of course, are paid in pesos,” said one of the managers at the 5th Avenue and 42nd Street store in Miramar on Tuesday.

The United States now has cut off the flow of dollars to Cuba to punish the Castro government for allowing rafters to leave. But Cubans are confident that savvy relatives in places like Miami will quickly find ways to circumvent the ban. After all, they ask, isn’t the longstanding American trade embargo by now almost laughable? The Miramar store, case in point, stocks everything from Crest to Coke to Ajax to Black & Decker.

In Havana nowadays, there is hardly anything to buy at official prices, so who wants pesos anyway? There are dollar hotels, dollar restaurants, dollar taxis, dollar hairdressers, dollar prostitutes, dollar beggars.

The pell-mell rush for dollars has distorted life at many levels.

“We used to have a health care system to be proud of. But who wants to wash hospital clothes for a dollar a month? I don’t think they’re as clean as they used to be,” said a Cuban journalist.

And with the economy in perpetual crisis, thousands of peso jobs have dried up in the years since the Berlin Wall crumbled. On getaway beaches, it is common to find rafters complaining that they have been trained for trades and professions in which there is no work.

“I’m a good carpenter. But who in Cuba today is building anything except boats?” asked a man named Ernesto as he waited to launch from a beach east of the city.

“Most people would leave if they could. So many men have already gone from this town in hopes of real jobs that we are calling this place the Isle of Women,” said a middle-age housewife at Cojimar Beach as she watched two large rafts push off into the evening surf.

The unemployed and the peso-underemployed pinwheel through the city and scramble for dollars and a ride north. Carlos, one of Tuesday’s sailors from Miramar, sold his clothes for dollars to raise money for building materials. One pediatrician is stoking his escape chest by buying avocados in the countryside for pesos and hawking them in Havana for dollars.

Competing with state-owned dollar taxis are the usually over-educated owners of rickety cars who will go anywhere to make a buck.

Owners of prehistoric Hudsons, DeSotos and 20-year-old Fiats made in Argentina flocked around dollar-rich Cubans as they left the Miramar merchandise mecca Tuesday.

Among them stood a salesman with the mien of a man selling dirty postcards.

“ Cebollas ,” he whispered. “Fresh onions. One dollar.”