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theirownbusinesses,ownproperty.That'sallnew.Forobviousreasonsit'snotanimmediate
possibility for a vast majority of the people, and it could be taken away tomorrow morning
by decree, but it matters.
Otherwise, our attitude toward Cuba feels very wait and see, as what we're waiting to see
grows less and less clear. We've learned to live with it, like when the doctor says, “What you
have could kill you, but not before you die a natural death.” Earlier this year Obama said to
a Spanish newspaper: “No authoritarian regime will last forever. The day will come in which
theCubanpeoplewillbefree.”Not,notice,nodictatorcanliveforever,butno“authoritarian
regime.” But how long can one last? Two hundred years?
Perhapsasecondtermwillbedifferent.Allpresidents,iftheywanttomesswithourCuban
relations at even the microscopic level, find themselves up against the Florida community,
and those are large, powerful, and arguably insane forces.
Mywife'speoplegotoutintheearly1960s,sothey'vebeenintheStatesforhalfacentury.
Laxregulations, strictregulations. It'sallaoneness.Theytake,Isuppose,aCubanview,that
matters on the island are perpetually and in some way inherently screwed up and have been
forever.
Therewasamomentinthetaxi,alittlenothingexchangebutsodenselyunderlayeredwith
meaning that if you could pass it through an extracting machine, you would understand a
lot about how it is between Cubans and Cuban Americans. The driver, a guy who said he
grew up in Havana, told a tiny lie, or a half lie. The fact that you can't even say whether it
was a lie or not is significant. My wife had asked him to explain for me the way it works
with Cuba's two separate currencies, CUPs and CUCs, Cuban pesos and convertible pesos
(also called chavitos or simply dollars). When I was last there, we didn't use either of these,
though both existed. We paid for everything in actual, green U.S. dollars. That's what people
wanted. There were stores in which you could pay in only dollars. But in 2004, Castro de-
cided—partly as a gesture of contempt for the U.S. embargo—that he would abolish the use
of U.S. dollars on the island and enforce the use of CUCs, pegged to the U.S. dollar but dis-
tinct from it. This coexisted alongside the original currency, which would remain pegged to
the spirit of the revolution. For obvious reasons, the actual Cuban peso is worth much less
thantheother,dollar-equivalentCubanpeso,somethingontheorderof25to1.Butthedriver
said simply, “No, they are equal.”
“Really?” my wife said. “No . . . that can't be.”
Heinsistedthattherewasnodifferencebetweentherelativevaluesofthecurrencies.They
were the same.
He knew that this was wrong. He probably could have told you the exchange rates from
that morning. But he also knew that it had a rightness in it. For official accounting purposes,
the two currencies are considered equivalent. Their respective values might fluctuate on a
givenday,ofcourse,butitcouldn'tbesaidthattheCUPwas worth less thantheCUC.That's
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