An Insider's View on Non-Market Economies

the following is translated from the Spanish:

Socialism's Mute Street Vendors
by Tania Diaz Castro, Havana, Cuba(www.cubanet.org)

Karl Marx was wrong when he said that man would have no need to leave his house in order to earn his daily bread under a socialist state. In the midst of Soviet socialism, no one ignored the good sausages and hams sold mysteriously in the staircases of Moscow, Berlin, and other Eastern European capitals, where the totalitarian state was supposed to ease the collective hunger.

By way of example, the street vendor's cry in Cuba has not ceased being a social need, for it represents a natural and all-too-human way to earn one's honest daily bread, and has been so since the world has been the world, since humans came down from the trees and decided to have and feed their family.

But since everything that stinks of socialism and communism goes against nature, it is in socialism where the street vendor's cry becomes something mysterious, prohibited, and criminal.

During the first decades of the Castro regime, when the government believed that through its own means it could satisfy the needs of the population and no one, individually, could take part in the economy, farmers were already creating networks of clients in towns and cities. They would arrive from their farm loaded with fruits, vegetables, and foodstuffs that the state could not supply in its stores. That's how socialism's "almost mute" street vendor's cry was born.

Later, upon the collapse of the socialist economies in Eastern Europe, Cuban farmers were allowed to publicly sell their products. To a certain extent, the street vendor's cry was back. However, police could, at a whim, confiscate foodstuffs and fine the vendor, who was left empty handed and with a fine.

That is why socialism's pregon [street vendor's cry] is not like that other one that was made freely, in the past, remembered today as a key chapter in Cuban folklore, a pregon made with elegance and personality. It is so ingrained in Cuba's free culture of yesteryear that it was featured in classic Cuban songs, such as The Peanut Vendor by Moises Simons, The Herb Seller by Nestor Milli, Zun Zun by Ernesto Lecuona, and many others.

Today, Cubans sell everything secretly and in silence. Those who sell do it discreetly so as not to attract the regime's attention. It is the struggle of a large part of the people against the economic model under which the country suffers. It is the cry, almost held back, of the desperation of Cubans who want to survive the hunger and the injustices of totalitarianism.

We are thus faced with a pregon that survives in corners and stairways, footpaths and country roads, but always without making noise. It does not take much imagination nor musical virtuosity. The secret of the socialist pregon is a simple one: do business inside, quietly. That is why it no longer needs bells, horns, or noise-makers to call attention to itself.

The writer Alejo Carpentier saw the traditional pregon like a habit with a remote origin. Poet Nicolas Guillen says that the elect, those who dare to climb higher mountains, will reach surprising results. And that is true. How many of those street vendors in old Cuba ended up owning a store of their own? There is something human about a just society where all have the same right to participate in their country's economy.

That is why even after 47 years of Castrism, laws, repression, and jails have not stopped those Cubans who want to live free lives. It doesn't matter that their pregon is almost mute. The strength of human nature is more powerful than precarious socialism.