Anyone looking at Cuba during 2023 and 2024 was immediately struck by two things. First, the economy became significantly worse than its even-then weak performance in the preceding years (except the first COVID-19 year of 2020, which was already disastrous, as for most places in the world). The last six years of growth in Cuba starting from before 1 the impact of the two main causes of today’s terrible economic situation, the greatly strengthened Trump/Biden Blockade after 2018 and then COVID-19, were: 2018, +2.2%; 2019, −0.2%; 2020, −10.9%; 2021, +1.3%; 2022, +1.8% (Anuario Estadística de Cuba 2022: 147, Table 5.1); and 2023, −1.9%. 2 Second, this very bad economy, combined with a number of temporary or permanent changes in the emigration laws of Cuba and immigration laws of a number of receiving countries, led to by far the largest emigration of Cubans since the Revolution 65 years ago. On Friday 19 July 2024, the head of Cuba’s national statistics office stated in a session of Cuba’s National Assembly that the country’s population went from 11,181,585 on 31 December 2021, to 10,055,968 on 31 December 2023. The large majority of that drop was an emigration of 1,011,269 Cubans, 9.0% of the Island’s population at the end of 2021 (US–Cuba News Brief, 25 July 2024, https://www.weareceda.org/en/us-cuba-news-brief/cubas-largest-emigration-in-history-july-25-2024).
Large parts of the population are struggling to cope with the economic hardships. On the one hand, the government is juggling scarce resources to try to reduce the immediate harm to the population from the bad economic situation, and simultaneously attempting to reduce the harm the situation is causing to the many historic welfare gains of the Revolution, in the first place healthcare and education. On the other hand, the government is continuing the process of promoting deep economic, political, and social changes, 3 this itself made much more difficult by the bad economic situation.
The first four academic articles in this issue all investigate aspects of Cuba’s very broad ongoing process of economic, political, and social change. The first considers the three-decade-long process of economic, political, and social changes as a whole. The second discusses the changes, and some proposed changes, in the still dominant production unit in the Cuban economy, the state enterprises. The third considers a potential new industry to earn crucially and critically needed foreign exchange. The final one looks at the changed political conduct of the government in its responses to the public protests between 2020 and 2022.
The first of this issue’s academic articles is “Three Decades of Innovation and Development”, a broad examination of both the economic and the political nature of the new approach to building socialism that Cuba was forced to begin to work out in the early 1990s, and which is still developing today. Cuba’s efforts to build socialism have been part of the worldwide discussion on how to do so since 1961, not only in the capitalist world but also in countries that have declared their intention to build socialism. Therefore we are particularly happy to be able to publish this contribution from two Vietnamese scholars who study Cuba, Tran Xuan Hiep and Nguyen Anh Hung. Its three main parts are 1) an overview of the whole process, 2) an analysis of several key factors in Cuba’s development in this period and especially the idea of cooperation with other countries, and 3) a consideration of the prospects for Cuba’s chosen development orientation. This work brings to the English-speaking world a view on building socialism in Cuba today that is strongly rooted in a view on building socialism that is dominant in Vietnam today.
The second academic contribution “The Cuban State Enterprise in its Labyrinth: Conceptualisations, Measures, and Changes to be Made” is by Humberto Blanco Rosalias, a former head of the Center for the Studies of the Cuban Economy in Havana. Given that they still constitute the type of production unit that contributes the most to Cuba’s gross output, there are a significant number of studies in Cuba on the functioning of its state enterprises. Outside of Cuba, however, and especially in the English language, there are very few such studies, and for ideological reasons “studies of Cuba’s economy” is overwhelmingly used as a synonym for “studies of Cuba’s emerging private sector.” The first section gives data characterising the condition of the state enterprise system at the end of 2023, while the second section looks at what the foundational document of the current ongoing economic updating from 2011 indicated for state enterprises. The next two sections discuss the state enterprises in the subsequent major documents directing the reform process from 2016 forward, the Conceptualization of the Cuban Economic and Social Model of Socialist Development and other documents relating to the implementation of those concepts. The final section presents concrete ideas for transforming the management of state enterprises to significantly improve their economic performance.
Readers of this journal will be familiar with a number of recent very concrete “possible foreign exchange earning industry studies” by H. Michael Erisman: see “Cuba as a Hemispheric Petropower: Prospects and Consequences” in 13(1) from 2019, and “Cuba’s Roswell Connection: A Crack in the Economic Door?” in 13(2) from 2021. The key topics addressed in the third academic contribution, “Cuban Medical Tourism: Exploring New Frontiers”, are a general overview of the medical tourism industry, background information on medical tourism in Cuba, and then finally the heart of the article, the numerous challenges to building up this industry and the numerous strengths Cuba has for doing so.
The fourth academic article addresses the dimension of political change in Cuba today. Contrary to the common perception that the government simply repressed the protests from 2020 to 2022, “The Cuban Leadership Copes with Mass Protests, 2020–2022” by Jorge I. Domínguez considers the very broad spectrum of tools used to respond. Repression was one tool, but the many others included appeals to “socialist legality”, emigration, elements of political accountability, selective political liberalisation targeting appeals to churches, LGBTQI+, and Afro-descendant groups, submitting the draft Families Code to public discussion, some liberalisation within the National Assembly and Supreme Court, selective democratisation, permitting opposition, and even the acceleration of the ongoing market reforms.
Through all the ongoing elements of economic, political, and social changes going on, daily life continues in Cuba in its plethora of other dimensions. Art in general, and painting in particular, continue to be today, as they have been for centuries, rich dimensions of Cuban culture (I strongly recommend a visit to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes if you are in Havana to provide thoroughly enjoyable support for this last claim). The fifth academic article, “La Mujer negra y discurso plástico en Santiago de Cuba” by Mercedes Cuesta Dublín and Yaneidys Arencibia Coloma, looks at (and reproduces in the article) the work of painters from Santiago de Cuba who represent Black women in their art. It uses cultural studies and sociology of art perspectives to interrogate the social conditioning of their depictions. It concludes that although the visual codes connected to the depiction of Black women in Cuban visual arts have indeed changed over more than three centuries, feminine and racial stereotypes nevertheless remain in the national imagery, and this is more so in Santiago de Cuba than in the country’s cultural centre of Havana.
A great number of those who participated in making the Revolution before its triumph and in its first decades after that are now deceased, and every year the number remaining becomes smaller. Recording their memories of those world-shaking events is of tremendous academic and cultural value. In 12(2) of this journal, Eloise Linger contributed an academic article, “Toward a more inclusive history of the Cuban Revolution of 1959,” the second part of which consisted of extended interview responses from three participants in the 1957–1959 struggle (of the 40 participants she interviewed in the 1990s, the results of which are in the process of becoming a book). In this spirit, in “Conversations with Marília Guimarães: ‘I spent the Best Years of My Life in Cuba’”, Salim Lamrani presents the results of three interviews with (still living) Marília Guimarães. Although its original publication in April 2023 in Études caribéennes had an English translation and this was reprinted in Z in June 2024, we are reprinting this primary source material here because of the limited overlap of our readerships and theirs, and especially because of the valuable glimpses it gives into life in Revolutionary Cuba in the 1970s. Born in 1945, Marília Guimarães made world news headlines when she hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1970 to escape the Brazilian military dictatorship that she had fought against since the coup in 1964. In these interviews, she talks about people she met and interacted with in the ten years she lived in Cuba in the 1970s: Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Ramiro Valdés, but also emblematic figures of anti-colonialism such as Almicar Cabral and his brother (and first President of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde) Luís Cabral, and above all her lasting friendships with the main artists of the Nueva Trova such as Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Augusto Blanca, Vicente Feliú, and many others. But beyond all that, these interviews are of great value for the insights they give about her life in a society marked by revolutionary fervour.
Looking forward, two things seem about as certain as anything can be about the future. First, within the frame of the strong limitations on what Cuba is able to do including what changes it can make because of the Blockade, it will continue its process of deep economic, political, and social reforms. As a first goal these are aimed at elevating the level of its productive forces, but beyond that, they are aimed at creating the human-centred socialism that has been the declared goal of the Revolution since 1961, under the conditions Cuba faces in the world today. And second, the largest contribution to its economic hardships, the Blockade, will not be mitigated in the future. When this issue of the journal is published it will have been determined if Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the next resident of the US. If Harris wins we can expect the current intensified Blockade to be maintained as is at least for four years, since she has made absolutely no indication that she will either reduce it or further intensify it. Trump, on the contrary, has indicated that he (meaning Marco Rubio, who Trump will again outsource his Cuba policy to as he did in his last administration) will still further intensify the Blockade. In the case of a Harris victory, Cuba can look forward to some improvement in its economic situation as it continues its reform process and continues to build new trade relations around the Blockade with Russia, China, the BRICS, and other countries in the Global South with some degrees of independence from US pressures. As long as the Blockade is maintained at its current intensity, however, it is not possible for Cuba to achieve a healthy economic performance – the hardships will continue, though hopefully diminished. In the case of a Trump victory, it is not clear how much worse additional sanctions will make Cuba’s economic hardships given the extreme measures of the Blockade already, but in this case it cannot be ruled out as a possibility that Cuba’s economic hardships will somewhat worsen.