In contemporary Cuba, there is a blatant contradiction between the high pricesof telecom and wireless services, controlled by a state monopoly, and the weakpurchasing power of the working class. This contradiction evidences a process ofcommodification that cannot be simply traced back to the partial privatizationsthat the Cuban telecom system experienced after the collapse of the Soviet blocin the 1990s. Commodification is derived from a broader restructuring of thestate socialist economy that started in the 1990s: the state-led appropriation ofvalue in circulation when value is in the money form. In the context of a crisis inaccumulation, obstacles against changing the conditions in production fosteredtransformations in the domain of circulation to appropriate value in the handsof the state. Within these transformations, partial privatizations and the commodification of the telecom and wireless services have played a key role for the national economy