After a long, exhausting day behind the wheel of his truck, Alberto Escalona would like nothing better than to rest his weary bones and drift off to la-la land on a comfy spring mattress.

Only in his dreams.

Escalona lives in midtown Havana. One of the many deprivations of life in Cuba is a dire shortage of decent mattresses, which are manufactured by one company under an exclusive agreement with the state. Escalona and his wife and their children sleep on threadbare foam rubber padding that hardly provides any support or comfort.

``At this rate, my children will have to be taught how to sleep on a real mattress,'' Escalona said.

But in a textbook example of supply-meets-demand, even in the communist world, a flourishing black market of mattress-making entrepreneurs has sprung up to help Cubans get a good night's sleep.

Until the economic crisis of the 1990s, newly married couples and outstanding workers were occasionally given the chance to buy Cuban-made mattresses through state-run stores.

No longer. Today, mattresses are passed from grandparents to grandchildren like prized heirlooms.

Enter the black market mattress makers. To get their raw material, they have been known to steal metal springs, stuffing and cover fabric from the official mattress factory. They also cannibalize old, discarded mattresses or use straw as a filler.

``Theft here has been constant, ever since the company started,'' said Luis Hernández, who works at the official mattress plant. ``The bosses need eyes in the back of their heads, at all times.''

In a bit of over-the-top brazenness, the freelance mattress merchants have been known to set up shop right outside the hard currency stores where the official mattresses are sold. Other nonsanctioned mattress makers operate more or less openly, using pushcarts or trucks to distribute their wares.

TAKING NOTICE

The government is beginning to take notice. According to dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, the authorities have increased their pursuit of independent craftsmen over the past year, engineering raids on clandestine shops and fining illegal manufacturers.

In Cuba, the Mattress Giant is the communist state. It has granted the country's sole mattress-making concession to an outfit called Dujo Copo Flex, a joint Cuban-Spanish operation created in 2001.

The company annually produces 60,000 mattresses. Generally, they are designated for ritzy tourist hotels that don't cater to Cubans or sold through hard-currency stores run by the government.

There are two types of currency in Cuba: convertible pesos (each worth about $1.24) and regular pesos, worth a fraction of that.

In a hard-currency store, a queen-size mattress made by Dujo Copo Flex might cost 120 to 180 convertible pesos. The same mattress would cost 5,352 in ordinary pesos.

Either way, the price tag exceeds a year's salary for the average Cuban.

While the cost of a black-market mattress is far less, the quality can be dicey.

``You run the risk of getting a new mattress with old springs and straw filling,'' said independent journalist Odelín Alfonso.

During a visit to the town of Guanajay, west of Havana, Miami historian and blogger Ingeborg Portales found a factory that manufactures straw mattresses.

``It was like an image from the Middle Ages,'' said Portales, who photographed the manufacturing process. ``It's exhausting work that allows these people to barely survive, provided the police don't confiscate their mattresses because they have no license to make them or sell them.''

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