In April 1998, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) approved a proposal submitted by the University of Florida to conduct a Cuban public opinion survey. The Project Team was led by Dr. Churchill Roberts, College of Journalism and Communications. Dr. Richard Scheaffer, from the Department of Statistics, provided advice on statistical methodology and supervised […]

Notes1 This paper has a dual purpose. At the technical level, it updates the work of Gitanjali Joglekar and Andrew Zimbalist (1989) on the use of factor analysis to estimate per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Cuba. At the analytical level, it questions the validity of this approach when the underlying economic structure of […]

Notes1 La noticia de la visita a Cuba que Juan Pablo II llevaría a cabo, constituyó, para muchas personas, un motivo de interés y expectativa durante todo el año de 1997. En lo personal, a mí me estimuló a conocer mejor al Pastor de la Iglesia Católica, su vida y especialmente, el papel que desempeñó […]

Antes que nada quisiera expresar mi agradecimiento a Raúl Fernández por haber enviado su trabajo con bastante anticipación. El trabajo de Raúl es un documento interesante y sin dudas una contribución a esta conferencia. Mis comentarios están enviados en tres partes. Primero: aspectos metodológicos generales. Segundo: algunas sugerencias con respecto a los aspectos analíticos. Y […]

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 […]