Mulas (Cuba)

Mulas 🇨🇺
Location: Cuba
Definition: Shuttle traders who resell goods purchased abroad
Keywords: Cuba – North America – Central America – Latin America – Borders – Entrepreneurship – Trafficking – Diaspora – Trade – Shuttle trade
Clusters: Informal entrepreneurship – Redistribution – Substantive ambivalence – Market
Author: Concetta Russo
Affiliation: Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy

By Concetta Russo, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy

The term mula (plural mulas) in Spanish denotes a person who profits from travelling abroad and buying goods to resell informally in Cuba. Mula translates into English as ʻmuleʼ, the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, all known for their heavy-duty carrying ability, but also used to describe an appearance of someone travelling with heavy bags or smuggling illegal goods across the border (e.g. drug mule).

Albeit the term resonates with the concept of smuggling, mula in Cuba refers to neither selling drugs nor any other role in illicit cross-border activity, such as money circulation, like hawala in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Instead, the term has a distinct meaning associated with a nuanced set of practices that emerged under Cuban socialism characterised by material scarcity and ideological constraints, exacerbated by the U.S. trade embargoes launched against the island from 1958 onwards. Endemic factors that nourish the variety of informal practices encompassed by the mula system include:

• ineffective distribution of goods and shortages of almost every product one needs for a daily life;
• poor quality and little diversity of circulating commodities on the official market, defined as ‘frustrated consumption’ (Pertierra 2007);
• restricted possibility of traveling freely anywhere in the world, which makes more difficult for common citizens to travel and purchase the goods for themselves; and
• lack of access to e-commerce platforms.

A sign celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, Old Havana. Source: Concetta Russo. © Concetta Russo.

In the 1970s, the term mula was colloquially used to allude to a form of kinship-based commodity circulation. It referred to those Cubans who imported goods to the island while living abroad, bringing all kinds of products on request and selling them for profit that covered their travel. This practice, common to most countries with socialist past, is still in place in Cuba. In fact, it constitutes a substantial part of the flow of goods and circulation of items between Cuba and predominantly the United States. The scale of the practice is estimated at 50 percent of remittance transfers that also points to the strength of the Cuban diaspora ties for the island’s entrepreneurship (Hansing and Orozco 2014).

However, in the last two decades, two factors stimulated a level of professionalization of this informal practice. First, the flourishing of small businesses such as private restaurants, beauty salons, and stores produced an increased demand for scarce materials. Second, the so-called ‘Grandchildren Law’ (Ley de Nietos) that was operational between 2007-2011, gave the right to apply for Spanish citizenship to descendants up to the second generation and expanded the possibilities to travel (Sánchez, Cuesta, 2017). According to a 2009 report, during its first two years, nearly 200,000 Cuban applicants have claimed this right. Thus, the term mula came to acquire another meaning, indicating a broker, a dealer, and a boss (negociante) who moves groups and organizes stays in foreign countries where the goods in high demand could be purchased cheaply.

The goods in short supply ordinarily comprise clothes, shoes, household appliances, nail polish and other beauty products. Latin American countries, such as Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela are ideal shopping destinations for both being the neighbouring countries and for granting travel rights for Cubans holding Spanish passports. Mexico and Puerto Rico, which host a considerable number of Cuban migrants, also feature a considerable presence of mulas. Other key destinations include Russia and Guyana, where Cuban can travel without visa restrictions, as well as Haiti and Martinique.

A complex coordination network between stores, hotels, hostels, rental houses targeting Cuban mulas has been operational in the receiving countries. The groups of informal couriers have become the main suppliers for both small businesses and common citizens. Negociantes take care of the whole process, from soliciting visas, if needed, to arranging all aspects of mulas’ stay in a foreign country, such as accommodation and transport from and to the airport. They buy or rent seasonal clothes for their team of mulas so that they can travel without personal items and use the luggage allowance for business instead. Being a negociante involves not only an investment of a substantial financial capital, but also a mastery of equally substantial confianza (trust from familiarity), the negociantes’ social capital.

Opinions on profiling mulas differ significantly. In author’s research, mulas tend to be women, while Cearns emphasizes the role of young men, who start as mulas while aiming to become negociantes (Cearns 2019: 888). Similar to the discussion of gender roles in post-socialist shuttle trading around chelnoki, the roles that require mass border crossing involve women, while negociantes, the mula-bosses who are in charge of organizing the trip and protecting the team members, are more likely to be men.

Mulas can import only a limited amount of goods into the country (up to 120 lbs each) and pay import tax on arrival. Once imported, these goods find customers informally in all classes of society and are sold without income tax or regulation of price, quality or quantity. The connivance of the state with those forms of ‘unreported economy’, as the Cuban scholar Mayra Espina defined them, is paradigmatic in the way the government exploits the mula system (Espina 2010). By collecting heavy tariffs, the government directly profits from this system of importation. Indirectly, the government benefits from the fact that people’s needs, that the government is not capable of satisfying formally, are being satisfied informally. By allowing the importation and turning a blind eye on reselling the US-embargoed goods on the shadow market, the state is able to overcome some of the limitations of the restricted access of its citizens to the international market (Russo 2018).

The international circulation of goods put in place by the mula system has been compared to the kula ring (Malinowski 1922) ‘as a lens onto strategies of creating personhood and expanding social worlds through transnational circulation networks of material items’ (Cearns 2019: 873). Observing these informal practices offers an opportunity to understand how peripheral economies work (Portes 1983). Indeed, the mula ring, as Ceans defines it, does not only affect the circulation of commodities in Cuba, but also acquires a moderate and sometimes considerable impact on the receiving countries too, thus challenging the idea of Cuba being an isolated country. For instance, almost one thousand Cubans travel to Guyana each week, and they purchase goods for the estimated annual amount of GYD$400 million (US$2 million), producing a large impact on the local economy (Semple 2016).

Albeit the mulas play a crucial role for being engaged in imports, they are also involved in some export activities. The latter include transporting artefacts and other paraphernalia connected with the Santeria rituals. The Santeria rituals are an Afro-Caribbean religion counting several practitioners in Cuba and in the US, Mexico and Puerto Rico, essential to the embedded nature of the Cuban informal economy (Holbraad 2004). The mulas also export tobacco, rum and local artesania (craftsmanship), such as a typical Cuban rocking chair in wood, or wood carved sculptures, which have come to constitute a distinctive sign in the houses of Cuban diasporas. The ‘transnational networks’ (Tilly 2007) put in place by the mula system play an important role not only in the constant negotiation between the socialist state and its citizens about the value and distribution of commodities but also in corroborating the representation of Cuban material identity outside the country.

References

Cearns, J. 2019. ‘The “Mula Ring”: Material Networks of Circulation Through the Cuban World’. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 24(4): 864-890

Espina, M. 2010. Desarrollo, desigualdad y políticas sociales. Acercamientos desde una perspectiva compleja. La Habana: Publicaciones Acuario, Centro Félix Varela

Hansing, K., & Orozco, M. 2014. The Role and Impact of Remittances on Small Business Development during Cuba’s Current Economic Reforms. Working Paper #69

Holbraad, M. 2004. ‘Religious “speculation”: The rise of Ifá cults and consumption in post-Soviet Cuba’. Journal of Latin American Studies, 36(4): 643-663

Israel, E. 2009. ‘Spain issues Cuba's first "grandchildren" passport’, Reuters Agency, February 6, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-spain-citizenship/spain-issues-cubas-first-grandchildren-passport-idUSTRE51502U20090206

Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland

Pertierra, A. C. 2007. Battles, inventions and acquisitions: The struggle for consumption in urban Cuba. University of London: London University Press

Portes, A. 1983. ‘The Informal Sector: Definition, Controversy, and Relation to National Development.’ Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 7(1): 151–74

Russo, C. 2018. ‘Informality in contemporary Cuban labor market. An anthropological perspective’. Interdisciplinary Political Studies, 4(2): 51-78

Sánchez, C. A., & Cuesta, S. G. (2017). ‘Migration and Spanish Citizenship Abroad: Recent Scenarios from the Cuban Context’. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 8(3): 91

Semple, A. 2016. ‘Cuban Shoppers Helping to Keep Guyana’s Economy Afloat.’ Demerara Waves, October 27. https://demerarawaves.com/2016/10/27/cuban-shoppers-helping-to-keep-guyanas-economy-afloat/

Tilly, C. 2007. ‘Trust networks in transnational migration’. Sociological forum, 22(1): 3-24