I don’t think westerners are even intelligent enough to know the reason behind it. I think the implication is that “low skilled workers” are paid as much as high skilled workers because socialism = equal everything. Or that Cuba is so poor that doctors make as much as cab drivers.
Personally I think people with more complicated and highly technical jobs should have some special kind of compensation, but the capitalist idea that you should be starving because you don’t do heart surgery is just evil.
AFAIK Cuba has been dealing with strange economic consequences of tourism basically ever since they opened themselves up to tourists. Dollars are worth a lot so “tipped” professions that get foreign cash get paid a lot, but the government doesn’t want everyone moving to tourism-adjacent professions so they’ve done stuff like introduce an alternate currency for converting dollars and stuff like that. The recent liberalization of small scale businesses is the latest in a long list of attempts by the Cuban government to get a handle on it, in this case by legitimizing - and therefore taxing - what used to be black market transactions.
tl;dr economy be complicated
Why? I thought it was a good thing that everyone makes the same salary. We are all of equal worth. There’s no such thing as “unskilled” labor.
Take the amount of value in the economy, divide it by the number of workers. That’s your salary. For everyone, from Premier down to street sweeper.
I thought it was caused by the end of subsidies from the Soviet Union. Regardless, it’s still a good narrative and everyone should be paid the same no matter what. Divide how much a society makes by the number of people. Presto, problems are solved.
