Is civil society silenced or nascent in Cuba? At present, scholarly debate on this question is quite polarized. The distance between those who argue that civil society is repressed by the Cuban government (silenced) or is barely at the stage of birth (nascent) is as metaphoric as the distance between Havana and Miami—close yet far. […]

Notes1 Put simply, the model of state-run agriculture implanted in Cuba after the Revolution worked—albeit far from optimally—so long as the state had the means to furnish the imported equipment, spare parts, fuel, lubricants, fertilizer and plant chemicals on which producers had become increasingly dependent. When the Cuban economy lost its Soviet-bloc supports, the island’s […]

Notes1 The widespread plunder and nationalization of art that has occurred in Cuba since the Revolution is very much like the ransacking and looting of both publicly and privately owned art collections that took place in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union during the Communist era. However, the most notorious and well documented looting […]

Notes1 ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América), the command economy alternative to the free trade model of globalization (García 2003), is one of the greatest and least understood contributions of Cuba to the current conversation about globalization and economic harmonization. (Bossi 2004). Originally conceived as a means for forging a unified front […]