Archana Pyati

Sociologist Susan Eckstein, who has been studying and travelling to Cuba since the mid-1970s and who has visited the country every year since the early 1990s, challenged the accepted political theory that Cuba is a country with a strong state and a weak society.

"The Cuban state isn't as all-powerful or as repressive as other totalitarian states," she said during her lecture for the Cuba 2001 series. "Society is taking the lead, and the state is responding."

Susan Eckstein

The Boston University academic said the unique dynamic between Cuban society and the government can be seen in the legalization of U.S. dollars and less restrictive policies on private ownership.

Cuban society began taking the lead during the economic crisis in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The government asked Cubans to return to the fields and work in agriculture because of the lack of sufficient food. The Cubans balked.

Ironically, Cubans' reluctance to do manual labor was the revolution's fault, Eckstein said. "It educated them," she said. "When people had university degrees, they didn't take well to working in the fields." Cubans resisted the work in spite of high unemployment in other sectors of the economy. Even after the government reduced the agricultural positions from full- to part-time, people still refused, and eventually, the government had to recruit Communist party members to perform the work, she said.

For their part, Cubans began making their own rules. They started trading in dollars and turned to the black market. By 1993, the informal economy was worth more than the legal economy, and the government responded by legalizing dollars.

This move has also been helpful the government, which is as desperate for dollars as its citizens because of a hard currency debt that began accumulating in the 1970s. The government has also promoted tourism, an industry condemned early in the revolution as "decadence of the old order" of Batista, Eckstein said.

However practical, the government's decision to promote tourism has also created moral quandaries for Cubans, she said. Prostitution, though still illegal, has become so prevalent that even college students sell their bodies for favors or dollars. As a result, families don't know what to teach their children, since traditional moral codes don't seem to apply anymore.

"Who's the best dressed girl in the classroom? The daughter of the prostitute," families tell Eckstein when she goes to Cuba. She added, "New kinds of illicit activities develop in the interstices of the dollar economy."

In addition to promoting tourism, the government has jumped into the black market and set up exchange booths with an unofficial rate of 20 to 25 pesos to the dollar. The official rate, which Cuba uses to buy rice, wheat, and other commodities, is still one to one, according to Luis Hernandez, press officer at the U.S.-Cuba Interest Section in Washington D.C.

Eckstein said that in 1993, when the government decided to legalize dollars, one-third of the country was already trading in U.S. currency. Now, an estimated 60 percent of Cubans have access to dollars, meaning "they not only use dollars but that dollars are part of their lives," she said.

In addition to tourism, another source of dollars is the Cuban immigrant community in the United States, which sends money, known as remittances, to families in Cuba. The legal limit is $1,200 per year, but many U.S. Cubans send more and get away with it.

Part of a family's survival strategy may include sending a family member to the United States so that dollars can be sent back to Cuba. What is interesting, Eckstein said, is that the latest wave of Cuban immigrants is poorer than previous ones, but they send a larger percentage of their income back home.

But even those who left Cuba long ago are reconnecting with their families still on the island, Eckstein said. No longer are Cuban exiles in Florida know as "gusanos" or worms; rather, they are now known more innocuously as the "Cuban community abroad."

In fact, a popular joke among Cubans is to say "I have faith" with the Spanish word for faith, "fe" -- an acronym for "family in the exterior," Eckstein said.

"Families come first," Eckstein said. "The Revolution hasn't destroyed that for Cubans."

She added that the trend toward withdrawal from politics in Cuba is "not out of hatred [toward Communists]. They have no time. Everyday life has become cumbersome."

In recent years, religion has become more important she said, because it offers some solace. There has been a groundswell of interest in Santeria, Evangelical Protestantism, and Catholicism. The affinity for Santeria, especially, seems to run the social spectrum from political élites to poor people living in the countryside, Eckstein said.