For the last 25 years, the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) has sought to embed analysis of the special case of Cuba within the mainstream of discussion of law, economics, politics, and culture. That process has sometimes found resistance in the long cultivated notion that the Cuban situation was sui generis, […]
The Cuban Communist Party: Current Status and Future Reform
Notes1 Over the course of the last half decade, the Cuban government, led by the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) have sough to implement far reaching reforms of Cuban economic policy. Among these are a new foreign direct investment law, Ley 118.2 News of Ley 118 was greeted with guarded praise, and some skepticism,3 much of […]
Religion, Social Norms and the State – The 2014 Letter of the Sacerdotes Mayores de Ifa of Cuba[i]
For the last two years I have written about the annual letter of the Cuban Council of the High Priests of Ifá (Consejo Cubano De Sacerdotes Mayores De Ifá), the practitioners of traditional religion brought over from West Africa with the slave trade and now naturalized as a powerful indigenous religion throughout the Caribbean and […]
The Problem of Labor and the Construction of Socialism in Cuba: On Contradictions in the Reform of Cuba’s Regulations for Private Labor Cooperative
On July 1, 2013, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party announced the approval of 124 cooperatives to operate in the non-agricultural sector.1 Grisel Tristá Arbesú, head of the Grupo de Perfeccionamiento Empresarial de la Comisión Permanente para la Implementación y Desarrollo was quoted as explaining that this push to open a small area […]
The Proletarian Corporation: Organizing Cuban Economic Enterprises in the Wake of the Lineamientos:Property Rights Between Corporations, Cooperatives and Globalization
Notes1 In the West, notions of property are at the center of economic and political organization. The law-state is focused on systems for the taxonomy and systemic protection of property (what is property and legal rules for its management). Individuals can aggregate property for the production of private wealth; organized as corporations, this property assumes […]