Prior to making some comments on Perez-Lopez’s paper, I want to start with some historical reflections about the importance of the sugarcane industry in Cuba since Colonial times to set the tone for the discussion of his paper. The transcendental importance of the sugar industry was already highlighted over two centuries ago when the country […]

Notes1 The legalization of the international sphere has been growing since the end of the last century.2 It is producing some sometimes significant transformations in the way in which people and institutions approach issue in relations among states, and international public and private actors, including powerful civil society actors. Legalization is supposed to provide all […]

The U.S. International Trade Commission’s (USITC) report, “Overview of Cuban Imports of Goods and Services and Effects of U.S. Restrictions,”1 published in 2016 at the request of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, is an impressively comprehensive study of the impact of lifting U.S.  and Cuba restrictions on U.S. exports to Cuba. It comes after […]

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 reform process taking place in Cuba under the direction of Raúl Castro affects the entire society in different modes and to different degrees. A thorough analysis of this process requires recognizing and dealing with the complexity of the economic system. In his paper Betancourt combines a New Institutional Economics perspective with a political economy […]