The 26 of July 2007 speech by Raúl Castro, the then newly incoming Cuban President, was a breakthrough in the history of public pronouncements by Cuban revolutionary leaders. Probably for the first time, the country’s president acknowledged that the economic system was tied up by a large number of bureaucratic impediments that had caused serious […]

Those who lived in pre-Castro Cuba may understand the title of this essay. Those who did not will likely be at a loss. Let us seek to clarify drawing from a series of essays written about Cuba in the fifties by American John Parker.1 The Havana housewife leaned heavily for the family provisioning on the […]

The Cuban agricultural sector has been in trouble for many years. Production levels of the main crops have decreased significantly, particularly sugar, beef and milk production, fruits, rice, and coffee. Cuba has been forced to import many food products for which it has the land and the climate to produce in sufficient quantities for the […]

The objective of this essay is broadly to assess the factors that determine whether the production of biofuels from biomass could be viable in Cuba and whether it could compete with food production. This question is important in view of the significant decreases that have occurred in Cuba’s agricultural and food production during the past […]

For the past fifteen years, as part of a broad effort to address directly the problem of widespread poverty, the international development community has focused on the impact that lack of access to financial services, faced by close to a billion poor people throughout the World, has had on their ability to escape poverty. This […]