In Cuba, a taxi driver can earn more in a day than a doctor earns in a month. The claim sounds like an exaggeration, and it is not meant as a precise calculation for every driver and every doctor. But as a picture of how pay works in Cuba, it is broadly true, and it is profoundly revealing. A surgeon who trained for years, who saves lives, and who is honoured in public as a hero of the revolution, is paid a fixed state salary in Cuban pesos. A driver who takes tourists around Havana in an old American car, who knows the hotels and the restaurants, and who is paid in cash and in tips, can take home far more in a week. The inversion is not an accident. It is the result of two economies living side by side in one country.
Two Economies, Two Pay Scales
The first economy is the official one. In it, the state employs most workers, sets wages, and decides what a job is worth. Doctors, teachers, engineers, and scientists are paid according to a scale that reflects the state’s priorities and its limited resources. Their pay is regular and secure, but it buys little. Food, clothing, and other goods are expensive in relation to a state salary, and many professionals live in cramped flats, share cars, and depend on the ration book and on relatives abroad. The second economy is the informal and tourist economy. In it, prices are set by what visitors will pay, and payment is often in dollars or other hard currency, which buys far more than pesos. Drivers, waiters, hotel staff, and private restaurant owners work in that second economy, and their incomes reflect it.
Tourism made the gap visible. Cuba has long attracted visitors with its beaches, its music, and its old cars, and after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, tourism became one of the main sources of hard currency for the island. A tourist who pays for a ride in a pink 1950s Chevrolet, a meal in a private restaurant, or a night in a rented room is spending money that goes directly to the person who provides the service, not through the state. Tips alone can add up to more than a doctor’s monthly wage. The result is a strange reversal of the usual hierarchy. In most countries, a doctor earns more than a driver. In Cuba, the driver who serves tourists can earn more than the doctor who serves the public.
Brain Waste and the Choice to Drive
The inversion has a human cost that economists call brain waste. Engineers drive cabs. Teachers work as tour guides. Doctors leave the hospital to run a small business. They are not doing this because they have failed in their professions. They are doing it because the market for tourist services pays them more than the state pays them for their skills, and because they have families to feed. Cuba has trained a highly educated workforce, one of the achievements of the revolution, and then created a pay system that pushes many of its best-trained people out of the jobs they were trained for. That is a loss for the country, and it is a source of frustration for the people who made the choice, many of whom would rather practise medicine or engineering than drive a taxi.
For the regime, the situation has always been uncomfortable. The revolution promised to reward work according to need and contribution, not according to the market, and it promised to honour the professions that serve society. A system in which a driver out-earns a surgeon undermines both promises. Yet the government has also needed the income that tourism and private business bring, and it has repeatedly, if reluctantly, allowed small private enterprises to operate. It has licensed drivers, landlords, and restaurant owners, taxed them, and tried to control them, without ever fully resolving the contradiction. The private sector is both necessary and suspect, both a source of income and a challenge to the official story about who should earn what.
What the Video Contributes
The video at the centre of this chapter follows drivers in Havana, and its strength is that it lets them explain the calculation in their own words. It hears how they came to the trade, what a car costs to buy and to run, how fares and tips add up, and what the work means for their families. It also hears from doctors and other professionals, who describe years of training, work that society honours in principle but pays modestly in practice, and the quiet resentment that follows. The film does not settle whether the answer is higher state salaries, more private enterprise, or something else. It shows, in everyday terms, what happens when a planned economy meets a cash economy, and why pay is never only a matter of money, but of the values a society puts on different kinds of work.
The lesson of the cab driver is a lesson about value. A society that says it values health and education, but pays its doctors and teachers less than its drivers, is sending a message, whatever its speeches say. The Cuban government has tried, at times, to raise professional salaries and to close the gap, but the gap is structural. As long as one part of the economy operates in hard currency and another in pesos, the two will pay different rewards, and the people who work in them will make rational choices about where to spend their time. The taxi driver is not the problem. He is the symptom, and the symptom tells us something true about the economy that produced him.