Paper short abstract:

Besides providing incomes necessary to complement low state salaries the informal economy in Havana also requires different abilities than state-employment. I show how these are both celebrated as admirable qualities and feared as they threaten solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

Since formal salaries were unable to fulfil household needs, state employees in Havana had to find ways to diversify their income-generating activities, often venturing into the informal economy. Besides generating higher incomes the informal economy required entrepreneurial abilities such as creativity, flexibility, determination, wit and guts. While being celebrated as positive traits they were, at the same time, feared. If spiralling out of control they were seen as threatening both the social and moral fabric of society through scams and grifting.

This resonates with how Emily Martin speaks about the qualities sought in a successful person within business or finance in the US and Europe. These qualities, which she argues resonates with how the manic phase in manic depression is described, are seen as both the ticket to success and as dangerous and constantly on the brink of madness. Martin relates them to an image of the self as a mini-corporation.

When devising a living in the informal economy people in Havana are, in fact, mini-corporations: one-person businesses looking to make a profit. At the same time the abilities needed to do so are constantly controlled through everyday negotiations by appealing to social and moral values. What is being threatened is not, as in Martin's ethnography, the mental sanity of the person and the rationality of capitalism itself but the social fabric of solidarity. The purpose and outcome of everyday moral negotiations was, then, to find economic strategies that were good in both an economic and a moral sense.