Practices of double currency: value and politics in rural Cuba

Ethnographies of contemporary Cuba often employ the concept of “struggle” to describe everyday economic action. This concept, however, lacks the edge to analyze social contests around value and the resulting structural differentiation of the social field. Inspired by anthropological debates on value and fieldwork observations in rural western Cuba, this paper begins to explore the social life of Cuba’s monetary plurality. I reconstruct and interpret some of the major features of the Cuban monetary landscape, namely, the existence of two main national currencies and exchange rates, different institutional rules for accountancy, and the awkward intimacy with the US dollar. The analysis of the national monetary system reveals the contrapuntal and historically contingent formation of an architecture of value based on a sphere of contained reproduction and a sphere of external reconnection. Additionally, paying attention to the money medium leads me to notice the politics involved in negotiating a dimension of incalculability interwoven in the functioning of the economy at large. The analysis of individuals’ and state actors’ everyday economic practices in this context provides a favorable vantage point from which to consider how particular economic operations take part into broader processes of accumulation and loss of value.