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 […]

Notes1 In the political economy literature as applied to development, there is a tendency to view democracy in onedimensional terms. In this essay we move away from this one-dimensional characterization. This broadening of the concept leads to a re-examination of the literature on the relation between long-term growth or development and democracy. With these two […]

Notes1 Many journalistic articles and a few academic ones have been published on the occasion of the half century of the Cuban revolution comparing that nation’s economic and social situation in 1958 and 2008. Such exercise is complicated by serious methodological problems that have not been properly analyzed. This essay summarizes the swings of economic […]

Cuba’s announced restructuring of its sugar sector in 2002 was one of the largest centralized economic decisions students of business policy and economics could ever hope to observe. In the spirit of “command-countermand” 71 mills were permanently closed (Hagelberg and Alvarez, 2006). While knowledge of many of the details of the restructuring will have to […]

El 2008 fue otro año difícil y con frecuencia peligroso para los sindicalistas de todo el mundo. Así lo declara el Informe Anual de la Confederación Sindical Internacional (CSI) de este año sobre las Violaciones de los Derechos Sindicales, en el cual se detallan abusos de los derechos fundamentales de los trabajadores en 143 países.1 […]