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Journalist Patrick Symmes talks about living on $15 dollars a month in Cuba. His article in the October Harper’s is “Thirty Days as a Cuban: Pinching pesos and dropping pounds in Havana.” And we air a 2008 interview with T.J. English about HAVANA NOCTURNE. It’s about how the Mob took over Havana and lost it to the Revolution.

In September, Fidel Castro told an American journalist the Cuban model doesn’t work anymore and said the system needed changing. He backtracked on his remarks a few days later, but then, a week later, the Cuban government announced it would be laying off half a million workers and encouraging the growth of small businesses. It was a momentous shift toward allowing private enterprise in what has been a tightly controlled state economy since the Revolution in 1959.

I first visited Cuba in 1970. I went with a group of about 100 young Americans who wanted to show their support for the Cuban revolution by cutting sugar cane in the big harvest. It was called the Venceremos Brigade.

At that time all Cubans had enough to eat, prostitution was non-existent, and most people had too much money, not too little. With housing, health care and education free, a ration system that provided adequate food and not a whole lot of consumer goods to buy, money wasn’t a problem.

But then the Soviet Union collapsed. And Cuba lost the billions in aid that had been propping up its economy when the US embargo choked off trade. It was the Special Period, when people really went hungry.

Then Cuba opened up its doors to foreign tourists and their currency. The Cuban economy split in two, between those who had access to dollars and those who had only Cuban pesos. It means that now, about 80% of Cubans struggle to make ends meet.

Journalist Patrick Symmes decided to find out what it was like to live on the wages of a Cuban journalist, about $15 US dollars a month. It wasn’t easy. He spent most of his time scrounging for food and lost 11.5 pounds in the process. His story, “Thirty Days As A Cuban,” is in the October 2010 issue of Harper’s.

Patrick Symmes writes about Latin America and other topics for Harper’s, Outside, and Condé Nast Traveler among others. He’s also the author of THE BOYS FROM DOLORES, about what happened to Fidel Castro’s own schoolmates, and CHASING CHE.

Read “Thirty Days As A Cuban”

via Cuba Present And Past: Patrick Symmes, T.J. English | Writers Voice.