All societies and economic systems—industrialized or developing, market economy or socialist—must deal with environmental disruption. In market economies, environmental disruption has been the subject of considerable economic analysis. Environmental disruption is associated with “failure” of the market mechanism in the face of externalities and public goods. Much less attention has been paid to environmental disruption […]

Notes1 In late September 1990, speaking at a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the creation of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), President Fidel Castro announced that the country had entered a “special period in time of peace.”2 He likened the prevailing economic situation—sharply reduced levels of imports of fuel, food, […]

Notes1 In mid-1997, the Cuban economy remains in the doldrums. The economic downturn that began over a decade ago, and intensified in the 1990s, continues to batter the island. While the economic free fall of the early 1990s apparently ended sometime in 1994, positive economic growth recorded since then has not markedly improved the population’s […]

Actions and neglectful policies of Cuba’s socialist government over nearly four decades will leave a legacy of environmental disruption that future governments will have to reckon with. We have argued elsewhere (Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, forthcoming) that the environmental disruptions that have occurred in socialist Cuba were not merely the result of the process of transformation […]

The last two decades have seen the emergence of a rich literature on the military in socialist Cuba. The interest in studying the island’s military institutions and functions was piqued in the 1970s by the overseas involvement of the Cuban military: overt intervention of Cuban forces in African wars; veiled involvement in Middle Eastern and […]