Over recent years, much of the debate surrounding the present and future state of Havana’s (and Cuba’s) housing sector has centered around the legal and economic issues related to restitution and compensation for confiscated properties, and strategies to stimulate much needed investment in this vital sector of the economy (e.g., Ashby, 2004, 2005; Driggs, 2005; […]

Although a so-called “transition to market economy and democracy” in Central and Eastern Europe has lasted for fifteen years, several issues remain far from being unambiguous. First, contrary to many optimistic linear visions characteristic of an early “transitology,” the exit out of socialism turned out to be a complex, difficult, open-ended, historical process. As a […]

La decisión cubana de bautizar el 2005 como “Año de la Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas,” no debe verse como un simple gesto de simpatía política. La propia supervivencia del régimen castrista y de su economía, ha dependido del suministro de 53,000 barriles diarios de petróleo acordado con el gobierno de Hugo Chávez mediante el […]

Notes1 Cast adrift in a post-Soviet world, Cuba has radically realigned its economic relations from the former Soviet bloc to the capitalist market economies. Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the island nation’s GNP declined by an estimated 35 percent in 1993 compared to 1989. Responding to the acute economic crisis, the Cuban […]