The Cuban Communist party has been rewriting the history of Cuba for many years now. This recent attempt is of greater interest than most because it focuses on economic matters, whereas historiography since 1960 has been weak. The author is a historian trained at the University of Havana and currently a junior researcher at the Institute of History of Cuba’s Academy of Sciences.
This short volume examines a critical period for banking and credit in Cuba. These years saw the creation and early development of the Central Bank (Banco Nacional de Cuba or BNC), the Bank for Agricultural and Industrial Development (BANFAIC), and other government financial institutions. These two were founded by a constitutionally elected government while the rest were not, a major difference the author is unwilling to appreciate. The statistics displayed clearly show that the banking and financial agencies established after the Batista coup issued the lion’s share of credit. When the author argues that the financial easing that took place during this period brought disastrous consequences for Cuba’s external sector, he does not exonerate the more than two years of sound banking and credit by the BNC and the BANFAIC under the democratically elected Prío government. This is just one instance of oversight among many in a monograph whose main purpose is to discredit any Cuban regimes preceding the present one. That includes the well-respected founding presidents of the BNC and the BANFAIC, Felipe Pazos and Justo Carrillo, who resigned their posts when Batista took power in 1952.
Another major deficiency of this book is the author’s lack of economic expertise, particularly in market economics. He has chosen to be led in his appraisal of the 1950–58 period by self-trained economists of the old Cuban Communist party, other international Communist and Marxist-Leninist writers (including Marx and Lenin themselves), and even Fidel Castro and Che Guevara (bibliography, p. 191). The author does not know that one of the frequently cited obras, the Informe del Ministerio de Hacienda del Gobierno Revolucionario al Consejo de Ministros (1959). was written by a team of economists led by Antonio Jorge (and including this reviewer), practically all of whom have long since broken with the Castro regime. The only commendable part of this book is the statistics. But even those should be taken with a large grain of salt.
