The last freedom fighters on earth!

paulvp(54)

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It is ironic that the two states still flying the communist banner — North Korea and Cuba — sit outside the dollar cartel's plumbing of SWIFT, KYC, and correspondent banking, yet produce some of the world's most ruthless, risk-taking entrepreneurs in money itself. They do not build apps in Silicon Valley. They move value under the nose of their own police states, and under the nose of the sanctions architecture that claims to govern the planet. I believe in laissez-faire, and I do not believe in coercive, intrusive government. These people live that creed, not as theory but as daily survival.

In North Korea the irony is literal. "In 2017, the international financial communications platform SWIFT, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, disconnected the last four remaining North Korean banks on its system as part of the international community's efforts to curb the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK or North Korea) growing nuclear and missile programs. Despite being expelled from the global banking system, however, North Korea has still managed to find ways to bring hard currency into the country."

Cut off, ordinary North Koreans and their brokers did not stop trading. They improvised. "North Koreans forge deals with Chinese smugglers that enable them to dump coal or minerals, camouflaged as trash, on a small island near the China-DPRK border on the Yalu River. Chinese smugglers then pick them up and take them into China almost every day. The Chinese pay North Korea in yuan or dollars, allowing them to buy supplies cheaply while avoiding taxes."

When cash must move without wires, they use the system's blind spots: "The DPRK also launders money using virtual accounts in regular Chinese banks. These accounts are not subject to the real-name rule; thus, China does not track who sends the money, which is directly transferred to the account user. If North Koreans open virtual accounts under fake or third-party Chinese names, it becomes very difficult for the international community to trace transactions conducted through such accounts."

This is not statecraft. It is entrepreneurship at the edge of death. The same BBC reporting that describes the state's cruelty — "People in North Korea have told the BBC food is so scarce their neighbours have starved to death. The government sealed the country's border in 2020 in response to the pandemic, cutting off vital supplies." — also records that "Exclusive interviews gathered inside the world's most isolated state suggest the situation is the worst it has been since the 1990s, experts say." In that vise, anyone who moves a dollar, a yuan, or a bag of rice without permission is not a criminal. He is a market maker, pricing risk where no legal price exists.

Cuba tells the same story with different money.

The state tried to simplify by killing its dual currency in 2021. It failed. Today, "Depending on the restaurant, store, or service, one might pay with the Cuban peso, the dollar, the euro, or the MLC, a virtual currency launched in 2019 by the government." The MLC trap is explicit: "The MLC is used by loading dollars onto a magnetic card which can only be used to buy goods in state-owned stores. However, they can not be exchanged back for cash dollars." And underneath, "the Cuban peso is subject to two different official exchange rates, one for businesses and one for individuals, and a third informal rate in which dollars can buy many more pesos on the street."

Into that distortion steps the courier. Havana Times profiles Naychel: "In the three years he has been working as a remittance courier, Naychel has probably distributed more than a million dollars. That's his estimate after reviewing his delivery history." He is the last mile of a global, peer-to-peer clearing system built because the formal system is barred: "It's a very efficient system, but also very complicated, because Cuba doesn't have access to most international banking services. For example, there's no legal way to send money deposited in the United States."

When Western Union was forced out, the market did not close. It went underground and scaled: "Since then, remittance transfers have gone 'underground,' falling into the hands of independent operators and a network of small agencies that coexist today... experts estimate that up to 84% of these transfers now occur outside official channels."

That is pure ancap finance — reputation-based credit, settlement in cash or crypto, routing around both Havana and Washington. And both capitals hate it. "One of the main online platforms that Cubans living in the United States use to send money, food, and clothing to their relatives on the island is ceasing operations as the Trump administration increases pressure on the Cuban government." The platform, Envioscuba.com, "announced it has stopped taking orders as round after round of U.S. sanctions aim to choke off international support for businesses in Cuba."

Why? Because even the sanctioned workarounds feed the state conglomerate: "Most such portals, including envioscuba.com, do not ship products from the United States to Cuba, but rather sell and deliver products stored in GAESA warehouses on the island, Morales said. 'The trend is for all of this to disappear, because GAESA is behind it all,'"

The Cuban courier, the Chinese-border broker, the IT worker wiring wages through a borrowed name — they face a pincer. Their own government will jail them for "illicit enrichment." The global compliance regime will blacklist them for evading KYC. Yet they persist, because families must eat, and because value wants to move.

This is the core of laissez-faire, stripped of conferences and white papers. No central bank, no SWIFT code, no permission slip. Just individuals pricing risk, bearing loss, and delivering money where politics says money must not go. While the rest of us debate CBDCs and file forms, they are the ones actually building parallel rails — with their freedom, and sometimes their lives, on the line.

Some call it "smuggling" or "laundering". I call it entrepreneurship in its oldest form: serving human need despite the dual tyrannies that claim a monopoly on money and deny the dignity of freedom and privacy.

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