In the City of Santa Clara, where the principal attraction is a massive monument to revolutionary martyr Ernesto "Che" Guevara (fought with Fidel, died trying to foment insurrection in Bolivia), I spent an afternoon with a visiting emergency physician whose medical salary was fixed at 785.35 national pesos per month. That works out to CUC$32.72. Like so much about Cuba, this isn't straightforward; Dr. M owes nothing for his professional education and his own family's medical care. His son's lifetime schooling is free. Produce and certain other basic foods not on the family libreta can be purchased in pesos, as can Cuban books, baseball game tickets, fares on the crowded public buses, and admission to museums and movies theaters and the ballet. The currency in which he is paid as a doctor will buy Dr. M the very kind of 1960s ascetic nationalism Che Guevara liked to espouse--in other words, as long as Senora M uses only the poor-quality peso soap, the M family brews only the peso coffee that comes with fillers ground in, and nobody buys deodorant.
"The toy truck I wanted for my son, with the little motor and remote control?" Dr. M said, as we stood side by side beneath the gigantic monumental pedestal, craning our necks up at Che. "Forty CUCs."
Forty CUCs in a state store, that is. Cubans maintain a robust black market--po la izquierda, they call it, "over to the left"--in which anything can be obtained. But the most surrealistic aspect of life in Cuba 2012 is the vigor with which the government, the same entity paying Cubans in pesos, sells goods to Cubans in CUCs. Retails stores, like pharmaceutical factories and nickel mines, are national enterprises, run by the state. Clerks often don't bother specifying "CUC" on the pricing of metchandise either; if ia thing whirs or glitters or comes in good packaging, Cubans know the currency in which it is being sold, and regardless of whatever the ghost of Che may be whispering in their ear, they want it.
By the time I met Dr. M, I had done so much confounded window-whopping that there were numbers all over my notebooks: Pepsodent toothpaste, CUC$1.50 per tube. Electric blender, CUC$113.60. Upholstered loveseat-and-armchair living room set, CUC$597.35. Multistory malls, with cafes and video game halls and clothing stores, all functioning exclusively in CUCs.
The cell phones Cubans depend upon--pre-Raul they were prohibited; now they're everywhere--are sold, both the device and the per minute fees, in CUCs. Evan a Bucanero Fuerto, one of the good Cuban beers, is likely to be sold in CUCs. The Bucanero price of one CUC, not an unreasonable sum in many countries for a bottle of beer, constitutes a full day's medical pay for Dr. M. You see the problem with the toy truck. This is why for four days a week, when he's supposed to be recuperating from his 24-hour emergency shifts, Dr. M drives a cab.
Technically, he drives his own car, the aged Russian beater he inherited from his father. But he picks up tourists in it, because tourists pay in CUCs. Over one high-season month Dr. M's cabbie days earn him the CUC equivalent of 15 times his salary as a physician. In Cuba there's nothing remarkable about this. The taxi fleet, like the rest of the tourist industry, is replete with splendidly educated Cubans no longer practicing their professions because their years of study to be of service to the nation--in engineering, medicine, psychology--produced salaries in "the money that's worthless," as a kindly Cuban bank teller once remarked to me. The phenomenon is referred to as the "inverted pyramid." Every Cuban who repeated that term to me did so in a tone of despair, as in: This, you see, is why the ambitious young keep leaving.
Dr. M and I studied the object Che was holding in his giant fist above us, determined that it was a hand grenade, and went into the museum. Che Guevara was an Argentine medical school graduate when he met Fidel Castro, and as we walked past the glass-encased displays of the Che medical journals and the Che lab coat, I glanced over at Dr. M. In the 15 years since Che's ashes were delivered to Santa Clara, Dr. M told me, this was the first time he had visited the museum. But he was silent and impassive, and when we came out , all he said was, "I don't get this about us now--how a taxi driver can make so much more than a doctor." The expression on his face made it clear that Che Guevara was not a topic he wished to continue exploring. "I don't get it," he said.
