My Self-Driven Liberation to Capitalism Without Leaving Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – Although my youngest son has been officially registered as living in my house since he was born, in reality, before he even turned one year old he went to live with his mother after we decided to divorce. I don’t believe our separation greatly affected my children, or my parents, who were also part of the family unit, because the undeniable trauma wasn’t all that tragic.
My ex-wife’s family home, where she moved after the divorce, is just three blocks from mine. So I saw my children every day. The older one was already six and would walk over to my house alone. We lived in a neighborhood with very little traffic, and walking that short distance wasn’t dangerous, as all the neighbors had lived there for decades. My parents and I always maintained excellent relations with the mother of my children and her family, and vice versa.
The boys grew up. The older one, after completing his military service, decided to come live with me. A short while later, he decided to leave the country. Thanks to God, to luck, and the timely alignment of universal events, he was able to leave legally by plane, married to a former schoolmate who was already living in another country. So, while the separation was painful, it wasn’t risky or rushed.
The younger one began dating in elementary school and got married as a teenager. Due to his marked independence and entrepreneurial spirit, he was practically living at his future wife’s house even before getting married. That hasn’t helped me much, but considering the economic limitations in my country, it’s something. The fact is, I’ve lived alone in my house for decades, but the well-known and legally recognized Ration Book for food distribution still lists two people at my address.
Through all these life events, my parents died, my ex-wife’s parents died, and my ex-wife herself passed away. I remarried. However, even before my father passed away, I had already turned my house into my workplace. In the late 1990s, I severed my ties with the State, leaving a job at a construction company where I worked as a mid-level technician. I wanted to take advantage of a then-new option: to get a license and work as a self-employed artisan.
It wasn’t entirely legal at first. The license had to be in the name of a retired person. Since I wasn’t of retirement age yet, I processed everything under my father’s name and started working from home.
The craft workshop I worked for used to provide all contracted artisans with free scraps of high-quality Cuban wood every month, leftovers or waste from state-run carpentry shops or from professional sculptors working on larger formats. They also provided free sandpaper, wax, wood glue, sharpening stones, all of which, while not a lot, were a definite advantage.
Then came the requirements and payment for delivered pieces. Oh my God! We only had to submit a minimum of three pieces per month, each about sixty centimeters tall with a cross-section of approximately 3–4 cm by 6–7 cm, and they paid 120 pesos per piece. You could submit as many as you could make.
There was another great incentive: the pieces could be submitted half-finished, or “raw” as we’d say, without a final polish. Just finished enough to show after rasping or coarse sanding. There were people at the workshop who worked every day on final finishing: sanding the pieces by hand or machine, applying wax or stain, buffing, or mounting them on bases if they couldn’t stand on their own.
For me, used to earning a regular (and decent, for the time) salary of around 265 pesos per month as a building technician, doing monthly reports with calculations and statistics, attending meetings, standing guard duty, etc., suddenly working at home and earning 375 pesos for producing just three pieces (which I could make in under a week and entirely to my taste), with the possibility of earning much more (which I never pursued because I spent the rest of the time reading a lot and writing a little, though I also wasted time on other things I don’t regret but should have used better)… well, it felt like being touched by the hand of God.
Four months later, they started paying 80 pesos per piece instead of 120. Six months after that, they stopped providing the wood and all the other supplies. The people in charge of finishing the pieces were laid off, and we producers had to do it all ourselves. The finishing staff was reassigned to other roles like cleaning or security.
Eventually, the payment per carved piece dropped again—first to 35 pesos, and then, as if that weren’t enough, two months later to 13 pesos, with the announcement that it would soon drop to 8 pesos. I decided not to wait for that. I canceled my contract, my license, and started selling directly to artisans in Havana’s key tourist zones, such as 3rd Street in Vedado and the Cathedral Square in Old Havana.
This time, as they say informally, I did it “bare-chested”—meaning clandestinely, straddling the line between illegality and indignity. I had to sell my pieces under the name of an artisan who no longer made them but held the license to legally set up a vendor’s table and he got rich at the expense of others in need including me.
A personal observation: let’s give the author of this post the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that he is otherwise an honest man. Because of the challenges he has faced in the course of being self-employed, he felt justified in being dishonest about his license qualifications. That dishonesty is like a cancer. It has been my personal observation of many of my Cuban family members and friends that a little dishonesty in the workplace begins to metastasize throughout their entire lives. Before long, men are selling cigars and rum smuggled out of the back door of the factory and normal women will sell their bodies a few days a week. In all cases, these otherwise decent folks see these moral compromises as just a part of everyday life. Sad.