Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. —Aldous Huxley The 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution offers an opportune moment to revisit the two erroneous narratives about Cuba’s late republican era that continue to inform the contemporary “conventional wisdom” of many scholars and journalists. One of these narratives argues that U.S. direct […]
Deconstructing “Constructive Engagement”: Canada’s Economic Relations with Cuba, 1993–2003
Notes1 Cast adrift in a post-Soviet world, Cuba has radically realigned its economic relations from the former Soviet bloc to the capitalist market economies. Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the island nation’s GNP declined by an estimated 35 percent in 1993 compared to 1989. Responding to the acute economic crisis, the Cuban […]
Circumventing the Embargo: The Strategic Context of Spain’s Economic Relations with Cuba
Notes1 Under General Francisco Franco, Spain like other countries of Western Europe, declined to participate in the U.S.-inspired October 1960 embargo of Cuba. Indeed, the Spanish caudillo kept Iberian Airlines, the state run flagship carrier, flying as the only direct link between Cuba and Western Europe. From the late Franco era to the present, Spain’s […]
Cuba on the Eve of the Socialist Transition: A Reassessment of the Backwardness-Stagnation Thesis
A major thesis advanced to explain Cuba’s transition into a Marxist-Leninist state centers on that country’s presumed economic backwardness and immobilism. In the “received wisdom” pervading academic circles and the media, prerevolutionary Cuba is perceived as a kind of Hispanic-American Haiti. The backwardness-stagnation thesis is often supported by a corollary: the alleged exploitative grip by […]