Monetary disorder: informal finance, digital trust networks, and new class formations in post-Reform Cuba

This article develops monetary disorder as an analytic for understanding how state-led efforts to stabilize monetary systems can unintentionally produce new forms of fragmentation, informality, and moral uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana between 2020 and 2025, I show how Cuba’s recent reforms – monetary reunification, the expansion of digital financial controls, and the legalization of private microenterprises – have generated a monetary environment in which multiple currencies, digital payment platforms, and informal trust networks intersect in unpredictable ways. I conceptualize monetary disorder as a durable configuration that emerges when official infrastructures of value lose coherence, compelling people to depend on bottom-up infrastructures of trust to conduct transactions, access goods, and preserve savings. My material demonstrates how efforts to formalize and centralize monetary authority can amplify monetary fragmentation, deepen mistrust in formal institutions, and produce new moral distinctions around legitimate and illicit accumulation. By analyzing how people navigate proliferating forms of cash, digital balances, and quasi-monetary instruments, the article advances broader debates in economic anthropology on monetary plurality, informality, and the social life of digital payment systems. Monetary disorder thus provides a comparative framework for understanding contemporary monetary ecologies shaped by unstable currencies, fragmented infrastructures, and everyday practices of improvisation and arbitration.