Self-employment in Cuba: The sum of a Haitian bazaar, a Swedish tax rate, and North Korean political representation. Quite a model for the 21st century. —Cuesta Morúa (2013) In interviews with Cuba’s micro-entrepreneurs over the past 10–15 years, I occasionally heard one of the two following old Spanish sayings: “El ojo del amo engorda el […]

Dos años después de haber liberado del mercado inmobiliario en la isla, como parte de las reformas que lleva a cabo el gobierno cubano para transformar su modelo económico, la realidad ha sacado a flote las debilidades y limitaciones del marco legal que limita y detiene el desarrollo de lo que pudo haber sido una […]

INTRODUCTION The circumstances of the economic crisis of the 1990s forced the Cuban leadership to divorce the agricultural model of the previous three decades characterized by large Soviet-style farms, copious petrochemical use, and sugar monoculture, for a far more diverse, direct, and sustainable model that continues to develop today. Within this abstract framework, the phenomena […]

Beginning in 1789, France produced the most significant of the social revolutions of the 18th century. Both the French and the American revolutions issued from the Enlightenment; swept away traditional systems; followed similar stages, moving from moderate to radical before a final conservative swing; and helped set in motion modern constitutional government, along with the […]

Notes1 These Fidelistas are excellent when it comes to stirring up people politically or creating militias, but they are less well prepared to organize the economy; this might harm the Revolution, and we want to prevent this. —Carlos Rafael Rodríguez,2 May 1960, as quoted by Dumont (1970:31) In this paper I adopt Schumpeter’s (1934) distinction […]