Cuban Economists on the Cuban Economy

Al Campbell ed., Cuban Economists on the Cuban Economy (University Press of Florida, 2013) hb 337pp. ISBN 9780813044231 and Alberto Gabriele ed., The Cuban Economy after the VI Party Congress (New York: Nova, 2013) hb 158pp. ISBN 9781622 574490Reviewed by Stephen WilkinsonThese two volumes on the Cuban economy complement one another most serendipitously in that the first, edited by Al Campbell, emeritus professor of economics from the University of Utah, concentrates on an analysis of the Cuban economy up to the adoption of the so-called Lineamientos or Guidelines for updating the Cuban model in 2011, and the second, edited by Alberto Gabriele of the United Nations in Geneva, is a briefer but more forward looking examination of the changes to the economy after the Party Congress in which the Guidelines were formally adopted. Armed with both these books, a scholar will be able to comprehensively evaluate the current state of the Cuban economy, understand the problems and challenges it faces and assess its prospects for overcoming them.The books agree fundamentally in one key aspect that is extremely important as far as this journal is concerned and that has to do with the way in which the Cuban economy, as with much else in the study of the island, is the victim of misinformation and disinformation. Both serve to redress, as Campbell explains, the bias in the study of the island's economy due to it having been made chiefly by analysts looking from the outside in and often with ideologically tinted glasses. In the case of Cuban Economists on the Cuban Economy this is an explicit aim, as the title suggests, because, with the exception of its editor, the volume is entirely composed of Cuban contributions, while The Cuban Economy after the VI Party Congress contains contributions from Cubans that are complemented by others from economists, such as Gabriele himself, who have sympathy with, rather than antagonism towards, the ideals of the socialist project.Indeed, another factor upon which both editors agree is the exceptionality of the Cuban model and the political, historical and therefore economic circumstances under which it has been forced to exist, and how this means that not only has its development been distorted by factors beyond the leadership's control, but also that a true understanding of the development that it has achieved cannot be attained without a holistic approach that takes all of these conjunctures into account. Refreshingly therefore, both volumes foreground an approach that is conscious of the complexity of the Cuban model. Both editors criticise typical western scholarship on the Cuban economy as being, at best, naive and often disingenuously shallow.These then are well-intentioned studies that aim to inform accurately and offer criticism constructively, and in doing so neither shirks from telling things how they are. Coincidentally, this edition of the journal contains articles by a key contributor to each book. Jose Luis Rodriguez, the former Cuban Minister of the Economy and Planning, and now an adviser to the Centre for the Studies of the World Economy in Havana, begins Al Campbell's edition with an overview of the first five decades of the socialist economy, while Gabriele's volume has an introduction by Juan Triana Cordovi of the Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana, on the political determinants of the recent changes. Both men comment fiercely on something that exercises many outside the island. No matter how far the market is being introduced in Cuba, both make it clear that this should not be read as a sign that the island intends to return to capitalism. In both these texts it is clear and runs through them both, as they say in England: 'like Blackpool runs through a stick of rock' - that is to say entirely consistently - that the objective of the Cuban leadership is precisely to save socialism not to destroy it. Cuba is embarked on an economic transformation that is aimed at achieving what the socialist model it copied from the USSR failed to achieve: true development in a socialist state. …