Writing a sophisticated analysis on Babalu blog, Robert M explains a new movie from Cuba about dumpster divers in Havana. Like any such movie under the control of the Cuban censor, it doesn’t directly criticize the 46-year communist regime, but the point is clear enough: Cuba under supposedly egalitarianism is now producing dumpster divers.
My own comment to that is this: As dumpster divers clearly can make more money digging through Western tourists’ trash than they can by working for the monopolistic state, there’s something wrong with the system that undervalues their wages that badly and makes dumpster diving more economically rewarding. The parts are greater than the sum of the whole. It’s the antithesis of adding value. It’s subtracting value, and exposing the vast ripoff of all workers in Castro’s Cuba.
Now why is that? Why doesn’t Castro pay more money? Part of the reason is, the currency is nearly worthless. Before Castro shot his way into power, Cuba had a perfect currency board to the dollar, making the currency not an issue during that supposed “revolution.” But Castro liked the printing press for his state projects and has since devalued the money, over and over, to absolute garbage, leaving workers with salaries worth about $15 a month, maybe $18 if they are lucky doctors. Devaluing money to near-worthlessness doesn’t eliminate inflation from a system – it rather, creates it. So instead of making everything cheaper, as people like Joey Stiglitz assure us, it snaps away the value and buying power of all earnings, leaving workers poorer than ever. There’s only so long you can do this, and Castro apparently stopped doing it in the 1990s, with the cutoff of aid from the Soviet Union. But that does not make things any better to workers, the value of whose work is, grossly underpaid.
It may be cheaper to live in Cuba than the states or Canada, but the wages people are getting are not keeping up to the prices. Cubans can barely afford anything which is why they are one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere, down from one of the richest pre-Castro.
Not only that, the Cubans have to wait in line all day long for bread, for rice, for eggs, for rationed meat, for milk – one line each per item. There’s no such thing as one-stop shopping in Castro’s island paradise. You’re supposed to LIKE waiting in line, because you have daddy Castro to take care of your every need.
The presence of the new film is pretty amazing in itself, and Robert thinks it suggests signs of cracks in the regime, possibly at a high or consensus level. Just the existence of this movie, showing that it’s more profitable to dumpster-dive than to work at a Castro job, highlights an incredible phenomenon: that Castro is literally unable to create value and is grossly underpaying his workers, due to his own profligacy.
Which brings up one other thing: Forbes magazine calculated Castro’s personal fortune at $550 million.
Read Robert’s excellent piece here.