Students of recent Cuban economic history will be familiar with the crisis the country underwent after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the system of economic relationships between socialist countries known as COMECON (Canler, 2001). Almost overnight, Cuba lost the international economic relationships that underpinned its domestic economy. Among the resulting painful consequences […]

Cuba’s global relations are on the upswing. In the two years since Raúl Castro took power in July 2006, he has ushered in subtle but important changes in Cuba’s foreign policy while benefiting from a widely-shared desire on the part of many foreign countries to reach out to Cuba during its moment of transition away […]

After years of neglect, the Cuban government timidly started to promote international tourism in the mid- 1970s. By the mid-1980s, in the midst of an external sector crisis, the Cuban government embarked in a counter-reform, idealistic economic development program named the “Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies” (Mesa-Lago 2000). Along with the abolishment of free […]