The Cuban Revolution is on the brink. Hyperinflation, mass migration, and deepening tensions with the United States are recasting the nature—and future—of the political experiment that has transformed Cuba and the Americas since 1959. The crisis born from the Soviet collapse has since become endemic, and the Revolution is now being rewritten from within.

In the streets of Havana, money is fragmenting. And with it, the political grammar of Cuban socialism.

This book offers an ethnographic and theoretical account of how the pluralization of monetary regimes is reshaping that grammar. It approaches Cuba’s expanding black market not merely as an economic phenomenon, but as a lived social space, an experimental site of governance, and a catalyst of emergent subjectivities. Tracing three interlocking lines of inquiry—the tension between state-sanctioned labor and informal income as competing moral and political economies; the symbiotic relationship between the expanding non-state sector and illicit exchange networks; and a new economic rationality that redefines socialism along pragmatic rather than paternalistic lines—the study illuminates a transformative moment in which the foundational meanings of money, nation, and revolution are being renegotiated under conditions of radical uncertainty.

This is not a story of decline or rupture. It is an account of the Revolution’s ongoing, contested reinvention—one that speaks to broader questions about the fate of socialist projects in a world shaped by crisis, informality, and the schizoid creativity of everyday life.

​Gabriel Vignoli is Visiting Professor of Urban Placemaking and Management at Pratt Institute and Associate Teaching Professor of International Affairs at The New School, both in New York City. His research examines Cuba’s informal, a-legal, and illegal economies. He leads academic exchange programs in Cuba and has extensive field experience working with the UN, the EU, and international organizations in Havana, Mumbai, New York City, and Rome.