In January 1961, a cargo ship arrived in the harbor of Santiago de Cuba bearing a load of freshly minted cash. Cuba’s pre-revolutionary peso had been stable and valuable for decades, a source of patriotic pride. Overnight, the Cuban revolution invalidated the old peso and replaced it with new bills, signed by Che Guevara and worth what the government said they were worth. The gesture sidelined opponents, reduced the independence of the professional and middle classes, and effectively seized the island’s remaining wealth in one gesture. In 1967, when Che died, it was his face that went on the currency, memorably gracing a 3-peso note that would get you lunch and a drink. Today that same bill is worth 12¢.
The end of Soviet subsidies in 1991 brought real economic desperation to Cuba. Dollars were traded on the black market. (In a dark Havana alley, I once got 125 pesos for a single greenback in a hurried transaction with a frightened man.) By 1994, in an effort to co-opt the black markets and once again take hold of the island’s resources, the government introduced the CUC. Initially this was strictly for tourists, the only legal tender for all those mojitos and langoustines. The CUC was pegged at 1:1 with the U.S. dollar, and just the commissions on exchanging it—up to 20 percent—earned the Cuban government billions a year.
No política. That’s what Yamil Alvarez Torres says as he settles onto a hotel sofa in Old Havana, his Under Armour socks showing a fashionable amount of ankle from beneath pressed jeans and a striped dress shirt. Alvarez looks the part of the new Cuban entrepreneur, a successful restaurant owner who has bourgeois hobbies—dogs and free diving—and an almost unlimited confidence in the future. But no politics. Like most Cubans, he avoids talking or even thinking about the nation’s closed and secretive political system too much.
Havana today is in physical bloom. A gallon of paint costs 30 percent of a typical monthly salary, yet half the houses in the city seem freshly painted. The once-ubiquitous and fuming thunder chariots of old Detroit are either shined up with new chrome and paint or, more often, sidelined by more recent and reliable Korean and Chinese vehicles. The people I’d known on the edge of starvation over the last 20 years of visiting are now fighting the creep of their waistlines and the return of pastries and deep-fried everything at street-corner kiosks. Even in 1991, Cuba seemed more open than it was, an island without barbed wire or machine guns, the friendly blue ocean serving as its Berlin Wall. Now the openness is tangible: In December, Cuba and the U.S. announced that the two intend to reestablish relations after more than four decades of enmity. On Havana’s streets, there’s a charge of anticipation, and one senses a people eager to embrace the world.