Cuba is an analytically important country for development scholars as a state socialist economic model. Vitor Eduardo Schincariol and Joana Salem Vasconcelos provide an exemplary, mixed-methods account of the Cuban economy since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and onset of the Special Period in Times of Peace. Their manuscript demonstrates how neoliberalization occurred with socialist characteristics, as the capitalist law of value was strengthened on the largest of the Greater Antilles during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The authors accomplish this task by situating the Cuban government’s political-economic decisions in the context of the global capitalist hierarchy between nations and the long-term trends in its macroeconomic performance, balance of payments, and the role of the state sector.
This case study involves drawing a contrast between eras. The authors begin by summarizing historical research on the period beginning with the Cuban Revolution’s triumph on 1 January 1959. What became the Communist Party of Cuba’s decisions concerning development represented an alternative to the United States’ hegemonic agenda in the Western Hemisphere. As the Cuban socialist state formed, it broke the neocolonial bonds that had underdeveloped the country over the first half of the twentieth century. The surplus value accumulated from sugarcane production, long hoarded for the benefit of imperialists and capitalists (inter)nationally, was put to work for social services and the development of an (agro)industrial base. The Soviet Union’s support for Cuba provided it economic and geopolitical opportunities to construct this more autonomous development model. Their relationship also presented a decommodified form of international exchange, relying heavily on preferential agreements rather than market-based price setting. Moreover, the Soviet Union operated as a primary lender, providing Cuba access to credit that enabled development beyond existing capacity.
Six decades on and the Communist Party of Cuba navigates decidedly different international terrain, conditioning its policy responses. Specifically, the dissolution of the Soviet Union has meant the loss of these preferential trade agreements and access to credit that had bolstered its economic growth capacity and enabled its robust welfare provisions. Instead, the coercive capacities of the capitalist market have become ever more present as decisive factors in Cuban socialist planning. That reality is connected to the ongoing United States-imposed extra-territorial blockade of Cuba, which harms its capacity to trade by reducing access to international financial institutions and shipping. Contemporary relationships with China and Venezuela, while supportive, do not recreate the conditions provided prior by the Soviet Union.
The authors utilize statistical techniques and official data from various sources, like UNCTAD and CEPAL, to provide empirical validity to claims made in the book about the role of dependence in Cuba’s economic outcomes. For example, in a discussion on the relationship between imports (IV) and GDP (DV), a linear regression is employed to test whether a statistically significant relationship existed when comparing the two periods. The results supplied evidence for increasing dependence upon imports as a driver of economic growth due to deindustrialization following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In another key instance, the authors utilize linear regression to analyze the relationship between GDP and household consumption as a part of macroeconomic performance. The results of ongoing low consumption evidence a trade-off between maintaining the social wage and increasing the coercive forces of the market on the population that would exacerbate already growing inequality. Even more, there is ample methodological discussions concerning the use of these data sources. This is valuable considering the dual currency monetary system in Cuba for the majority of the period under investigation, as well as the differential accounting techniques within the state socialist budgeting system. That builds on long running debates in the economics literature on how to measure such indicators as GDP in state-led socialist countries.
The quantitative analysis is tied into a thorough qualitative analysis of institutional change through primary sources, such as speeches and legislation in the Gaceta Oficial, and a review of secondary historical sources. A major focus is on the “Guidelines of Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution” which produced the largest set of reforms in Cuba since the establishment of the socialist state. These reforms decentralized major aspects of the economy, formalized self-employment through the cuentapropista designation, and continued the rollback trend of certain social services, like the libreta (the state ration system). The reforms follow other alterations within the Cuban economy, such as drawing down the emphasis on export-oriented sugarcane production and increasing support for the tourism industry as a source of foreign reserves. The tourism industry’s market-orientation is also displayed through the joint ownership of companies with international capital, such as the Spanish company Iberostar.
Together, the quantitative and qualitative results reveal shifting policy with an increasing introduction of the law of value into the economy. The sum of these reforms indicate a neoliberalization of state-led socialism, demonstrating how globalizing are those structural and institutional tendencies. The authors implicitly provide evidence against the idea of a “late-stage” capitalism, instead describing how even socialist states have increasingly come to embody ever more of the contemporary institutional and structural realities of the capitalist system. Rather than capitalism in decline, the Cuban government seeking ways to formalize its participation in the international financial regime represents how capitalist rules of the game have become even more entrenched after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.
In many ways, the question of “how much the law of value should influence decisions and priorities” echoes debates that occurred internally to Cuba at the beginning of the revolutionary process. To what extent can socialist states rely on market mechanisms without contravening key ideological principles? The authors conceptualize peripheral socialism as impacting what are possible responses to this question, whereby the position within the global hierarchy of accumulation based on a low level of (agro)industrial capacity impacts Cuba’s ability to accrue surplus value from production. That then reproduces the dynamics of dependency and the development of underdevelopment outlined by Latin American scholars beginning in the twentieth century. As such, Cuban government officials were likely pushed by circumstance rather than an ideological predisposition toward a neoliberalism with socialist characteristics. The authors could encapsulate this reality in the oft-repeated quote from Marx, “[Humans] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”.
Future research should build on this work to explore further the concept of peripheral socialism. There are times where the authors left this idea undertheorized and missed opportunities to further develop what it entails. In one form, the authors argue for less of this theorizing to instead interrogate “really existing socialism” and how a concrete case navigated internal and external limits to that project. Furthermore, I offer here my interpretation of the authors’ results, what their work generated in terms of my ongoing thinking about the Cuban socialist project and global capitalism. This may not be a view shared by the authors who consider Cuba to be under neoliberal pressure, rather than exhibiting a neoliberalization process. In that, this manuscript creates space for debate in the twenty-first century, what would a feasible socialism entail?
