Dollar blues.

Angelita Maila would rather be roasting cuys, or guinea pigs, than fried plantains on the street-side grill she owns near a monument where tourists flock to straddle the equatorial line. But since Ecuador abandoned its sucre currency for the dollar last year to halt an economic crisis, the price of cuy has increased threefold. "With the dollar everything has gone up," says the 35-year-old mother of four. "A whole cuy now costs US$10." Ecuadorians themselves are feeling like guinea pigs these days after the government replaced the century-old currency with the dollar, in September, to control inflation and broaden trade ties. If the experiment works, several other Latin American nations are poised to take the plunge. Most of the 12.5 million inhabitants of Ecuador believe that the change has brought some improvements to this impoverished Andean nation.