I lay down on the sand to think. The bronzed men and women weaving between the tourists thought of us purely as wallets on legs, there was no point in deluding oneself; but it was just the same in every third-world country. What was particular about Cuba was this glaring problem with industrial production. I myself was completely incompetent in matters of industrial production. I was perfectly adapted to the information age, that is to say good for nothing. Like me, Valerie and Jean-Yves knew only how to manage information and capital; they used their knowledge intelligently, competitively, while I used mine in more mundane, bureaucratic ways. But if, for example, a foreign power were to impose a blockade, not one of the three of us, nor anyone I knew, would have been capable of getting industrial production up and running again. We had not the least idea about casting metal, manufacturing parts, thermoforming plastics. Not to mention more complex objects like fibre optics or microprocessors. We lived in a world made up of objects whose manufacture, possible uses and functions were completely alien to us. I glanced around me, panic-stricken by this realisation: there was a towel, a pair of sunglasses, sun screen, a paperback by Milan Kundera. Paper, cotton, glass; complex machines, sophisticated manufacturing processes. Valerie's swimsuit, for example, I was incapable of grasping the manufacturing process which had gone into making it: it was made of 80 per cent latex, 20 per cent polyurethane. [...]