It seems that about every thirty years Cuba’s economy has been buffeted by an economic cataclysm. The War of Independence in the late 1890s devastated the economy and decimated its population. The Great Depression affected Cuba deeply in the 1930s. The Socialist Revolution created massive economic upheaval in the 1960s. Then the dissolution of the […]

Notes1 “Para Cuba que sufre, la primera palabra.” —José Martí Pérez The recent fainting spell that Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, suffered during a speech he was making at a mass rally in Havana has renewed the interest in studying a post-Castro scenario. Castro’s mortality, a taboo topic in Cuba, as well as the course […]

As of late there is a burgeoning discussion in the social sciences about how political mobilization and civil society affect the chances for a sustained democratic polity. One of the prevailing views in this literature asserts that the higher the rate of mobilization in civil society, the better the chances for a lasting democracy. In […]

The state’s entrepreneurial perfectionism that is being implemented in Cuba constitutes one of the fundamental links of the new economic policy being carried out by the governmental authorities and is an integral part of structural economic change that, in this arena, the Castro administration has developed in less than forty years. “It is a new […]

Notes1 I am honored to have been asked to comment on a book by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a person I admire greatly for his tremendous contributions to the literature on social security in Latin America and on the Cuban economy. His work has always been scholarly and unbiased, and this latest endeavor is not an exception. […]