Issue 50 of the once-a-year journal Cuban Studies contains 13 “normal academic articles”. These are presented in four groups; Dossier 1: “Cuba y los nuevos desafíos del sector privado, en el marco de las actuales transformaciones de la Nación” with six articles; Dossier 2: “Packaging Cuban Media: Communities of Digital Sharing in Cuba and Its Diaspora” with four articles; and two short sections, one labelled “History” with two articles, and a final section labelled “Culture and Society” with a single article. Then there is a section “Primary Sources” with a single interview of Leonardo Padura, and a section “Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 2019” with a one-page reproduction of the artwork that won that prize. The 12 book reviews of 20 books (one review essay of six books and one of four books) are divided into three groups; “Diaspora”, “History” and “Culture and Society.”
The organiser of Dossier 2, Jenifer Cearns, has selected for its subject a topic that is currently both of great interest concerning, and importance to, many issues in the changing social organisation of Cuba, el paquete. Noting that there are “many different aspects associated with el paquete”, each of the four contributions that follow her useful introductory overview addresses a particular one of its aspects. These are reflected by their titles: “The Opium of the Paquete: State Censorship, Private Self-Censorship, and the Content Distribution Strategies of Cuba’s Emergent Independent Digit-Media Start-ups”; “Sounding El Paquete: The Local and Transnational Routes of an Afro-Cuban Repartero”; “Connecting (to) Cuba: Transnational Digital Flows between Havana and the Cuban Diaspora”; and “Disrupting the Algorithm: The Streaming Platforms in the Cuban Audiovisual Landscape: El paquete seminal, Netflix, and Mi Mochila.” With this structure, Cearns aims to “draw together various aspects of el paquete and media-sharing practices in Cuba today, focusing on the way new and old communities alike are created, perpetualized, and redefined through emerging digital networks and practices”. Two limitations strike one immediately to this collection – I do not want to call these “weaknesses”, as it is both too simple and also inappropriate for a reviewer to criticise a work for what it does not do, when it makes valuable contributions to doing what it clearly says it intends to do. The first limitation is simply that, as Cearns points out, there are “many” different aspects to the social phenomenon of el paquete, and so necessarily four articles fall far short of a thorough picture of el paquete. Again, I stress that pulling together four different solid and valuable pieces on four aspects of el paquete is a rich contribution to the broader picture, but also that it requires additional work. The second limitation is the absence of any Cuban points of view (of which of course there are many different ones), given in particular both the importance of this phenomenon in Cuba, and the significant amounts of writing being done on it by Cuban authors. To repeat yet once more, this is a limitation that in no way reduces the value of these contributions to that necessarily still bigger picture.
The two pieces in the History section and the piece in the Culture and Society section are all rich academic works on three narrowly focused issues: “La deportación en la Guerra de los Diez Años (1868–1878)”; “Listeners in Revolution: Radio Wars for Havana, 1959”; and “Revolution on Two Wheels: Pains and Pleasures of Women Bicycling in the Special Period”.
Dossier 1, “Cuba y los nuevos desafíos del sector privado, en el marco de las actuales transformaciones de la Nación”, would have benefited from the sort of introduction that Dossier 2 has, an introduction that is typical of dossiers in Cuba Studies. Such dossiers are valuable because of the focus achieved among the articles, and from that the interaction of their ideas. An introduction makes clear to the reader what the intention was in creating a given dossier, what the organisers intended the dossier to address (which in itself indicates a lot about their evaluation of the issue) and what the contributors were oriented toward contributing. Leaving that weakness aside, one has here a rich collection of articles on the growing, and transforming, non-state sector in Cuba. It is a valuable collection of an overview of the Cuban private sector plus five “case studies”.
There are people who see the continual expansion of the private sector of the economy until it comes to dominate the whole economy, and thereby restore capitalism, as the desirable future for Cuba. Making a solid investigation of parts of the private sector, of course, does not require, or even imply, that position. But just as the first article in this dossier correctly points out in its abstract that “the non-state sector has the potential to transform the still-predominant state sector”, it is equally important for understanding the non-state sector (which is the purpose of this dossier) to note the important influence in the other direction, to be aware that the development of the non-state sector will be fundamentally influenced by the development and nature of the state sector. An introduction to Dossier 1 would have been an ideal place to indicate the crucial importance of the development of the state sector to the development of what they are investigating, the private sector. Just noting that important point in an introduction would not in itself have required them to go into an actual discussion of the effect of the state sector on the private sector, which is not what they chose to direct their valuable investigations toward.
The first article in Dossier 1, “Nuevos desarrollos en el sector no estatal cubano”, is an overview of the private sector by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Omar Everleny Pérez and Pavel Vidal. Using official government statistics, primarily for the last decade, it carefully studies, and clearly and extensively documents, the evolution of the size of the non-state sector and its component parts. The value of the article’s useful and extensive discussion of the “avances y problemas” in the sector’s various subsectors is limited, however, by its acceptance of the “market fundamentalist” frame of analysis. This concept is at the heart of neoliberalism, and it is certainly widely used by many institutions and economists throughout the world: by the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO; by most economists outside Cuba writing on the Island’s economy and even by many inside Cuba. It holds that markets necessarily should be as devoid of any government regulation as possible. Institutions that champion this view, such as The Economist magazine, like to call such regulation “state meddling”, and advocate that market participants should be as free as possible to pursue profits, however they choose. This position rests on the contention that completely unregulated markets are always optimally efficient, and therefore that they will yield optimal growth. The bulk of the discussion in the article on “advances and problems” then consists of referencing removals of regulations on the operation of markets that have occurred over the last decades as “advances”, and indicting remaining regulations as “problems”.
The issue from an academic point of view is not that the authors believe in market fundamentalism. As pointed out, notwithstanding that the rejection of market fundamentalism has grown greatly in recent years because of neoliberalism’s poor performance globally over the last decade, there are still many economists around the world and powerful international economic institutions that adhere to it (particularly in their practices, independent of any recent repackaged self-presentation). As such it is not only appropriate but necessary that the academic debate about how to improve Cuba’s economy include adherents to this significant current of economic thought. Let 100 flowers bloom (and really do so, do not just pretend to do so). Rather, what is not academically acceptable is to claim that one is judging some institution’s performance, in this case Cuba’s economy, for “advances and problems”, without actually also presenting in this analysis the goals of that institution, what it is trying to achieve. All of Cuba’s fundamental economic guideline documents of the last decade, several referenced in this article by Mesa-Lago et al., stress at length that Cuba has a tripartite economic goal – to promote material growth (“prosperity”), to make its economic and the related social development both economically and ecologically sustainable, and to support the development of socialism. Therefore, even if market fundamentalism did generate optimal material growth, which this reviewer and many others hold is not the case (consider the obvious example of China versus the world’s neoliberal economies over the last 40 years), using material growth alone to determine success and failures would not correspond to what Cuba’s economic policies are consciously designed to achieve. In the article “Evaluating Against a Multi-Dimensional Economic Goal: A Sustainable and Prosperous Socialism” in this journal (which is now open source, all articles are available free online to anyone), issue 13(1), June 2021, this reviewer elaborated on this position. Note that the argument is not that markets, or even subordinated capitalist sectors of the economy, are a priori inappropriate for building socialism. To the contrary, the argument is as indicated, that any policies must be evaluated against the goals that they are intended to fulfil, and that in the case of Cuba one of those goals has long been clearly stated to be building socialism. The article then considers markets and subordinated capitalist relations only briefly as two of the examples presented to illustrate the process of properly evaluating Cuba’s performance against its multi-dimensional economic goal; the article makes no claim to be carrying out a definitive consideration of the issue. It needs to be stressed that a methodologically proper evaluation does not necessarily mean that one will reach a conclusion directly contrary to that from a methodologically improper one. The article finds that the extension of markets in Cuba today, under the conditions that exist in Cuba today, has a strong potential to serve all Cuba’s economic goals, subject to some regulation to make sure that it does not harm in particular the goal of building socialism. It also concludes that the very different policy of extending subordinate capitalist relations of production, specifically the authorisation of the formation of micro, small and medium capitalist enterprises, also has the potential to serve all three dimensions of Cuba’s economic goal, again under the specific conditions that exist in Cuba today. But it further concludes that the potential that this latter policy could, contrary to intention, harm the goal of building socialism is vastly greater than from the very different policy of the expansion of the use of markets.
The next two articles in Dossier 1 are the case studies “CubaEmprende como referente de capacitación de los negociaos privados en Cuba, su evolución e impacto” by Jorge Mandilego Alfonso, and “Los negocias privados en Cuba y sus perspectivas en las actuales transformaciones de la Nación: Un acercamiento desde la impronta de CubaEmprede” by William Bello Sánchez. Leaving aside the almost universal false equating of “entrepreneurship” with capitalist production (as socialists have long pointed out to the contrary, the desired economic development in building socialism, including when properly understood as socio-economic development, requires entrepreneurship), these are two valuable investigations of CubaEmprende, which is one of a number of programmes in Cuba designed to teach potential capitalists how to run a small capitalist enterprise. While the next article “Posicionamiento de los emprendimientos privados cubanos en el contexto de las transformaciones del país” by Raydel García López is not actually a case study, it shares their nature, and from that their academic value, by being very much a “where-the-tires-meet-the-road” study, based on the author’s role of advising more than 80 of Cuba’s private companies over a period two years.
The last two studies in the dossier resemble the first three in their value as very informative concrete studies of the expansion of the private sector in Cuba. They also, however, differ from them in a fundamental way. While the second to fourth articles in the dossier consistently present the private sector, in line with all the government’s national development guidelines from the past decade, as part of the national economic development effort, they remain quiet on the issue of the development of the private sector serving the development of socialism in Cuba, which is also part of those fundamental documents. To differing degrees between the articles, they present the private sector as being in conflict with, and harmed by, the government’s efforts to assure that the sector serves the overall project of building socialism, and that it does not adopt the project of restoring capitalism. These last two articles, to the contrary, approach the private sector as part of Cuba’s socio-economic goal of building socialism in Cuba, consistent with how the sector is considered by the Cuban government in the fundamental guidelines. As such, here one has a frame in which one can evaluate their performance in the only way appropriate, against the goals that they are socially intended to achieve. Note that this observation about the articles is being made in relation to how the various articles evaluate the performance of the private sector, and not as a comment on the ideology of the authors, since the second article in the first group of three and the first article in this second group of two are by the same author. The penultimate article is again a case study, “Responsabilidad social empresarial, una práctica desde los negocios privados en Cuba. La experiencia de Vélo Cuba y Juanky’s Pan” by William Bello Sánchez. The final article is “Responsabilidad socio-ambiental empresarial: Oportunidades y realidad desde el emprendimiento en Cuba” by Yociel Marrero Baez and Roberto Sánchez Medina.
What this reviewer finds particularly interesting about these last two articles, beyond their excellent informative content, is what they reflect about the whole process of building socialism in Cuba today. There has been a fundamental change in Cuba between the understanding of one aspect of the process of building socialism in Cuba in the 1970s and early 1980s and the understanding of that today. This is a change that the opponents of socialism in Cuba around the world have entirely failed to understand or even notice, and which interestingly is also only minimally understood by many (fortunately far from all) of the supporters around the world of Cuba’s efforts to build a post-capitalist society. What has remained the same is the commitment to building a society that supports and promotes human well-being and development, the vision of socialism since the 1800s and before, and the connected conviction that this requires building a better society than capitalism. The fundamental change in the Cuban government’s commitment to this goal has been the recognition, and repeated open declaration, that no one has a detailed blueprint or recipe for how to do that, and that Cuba is going to have to pragmatically, in the world as it exists today, “make its own road by walking it”. As Fidel said in a lengthy speech at the Aula Magna at the University of Havana on 17 November 2005:
among all the errors we may have committed, the greatest of them all was that we believed that someone really knew something about socialism, or that someone actually knew how to build socialism. It seemed to be a sure fact, as well-known as the electrical system conceived by those who thought they were experts in electrical systems. Whenever they said: “That’s the formula,” we thought they knew.
Or as Raúl said so poetically on 18 December 2010, during the closing ceremony of the Sixth Session of the Seventh Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power:
la edificación de la nueva sociedad en el orden económico es, en mi modesta opinión, también un trayecto hacia lo ignoto – hacia lo desconocido.
What remains “fascinating as an object of academic study” about the Revolution in Cuba today is that it is very much a living, constantly changing and evolving, attempt to build a better world. Note from the titles and contents of these last two articles in Dossier 1 how the process in Cuba today is interacting with other processes around the world that are trying to move beyond capitalism. The concept of a “social enterprise” was worked on extensively in Venezuela’s revolution in the first decade of this century, and much more broadly than that, it is one of the many strands of the very loosely defined worldwide movement for a “Social and Solidarity Economy”.
Like all previous issues of Cuba Studies, this one is full of materials throwing light on this ongoing process.