Given the pace of change in the formerly socialist bloc, any book on contemporary Cuba will be out of date before it is printed. Though this volume of essays by 22 authors is no exception, it is nevertheless worth reading for reasons the authors probably did not intend. This is not so much a book about Cuba as it is a portrait of a school of thought on Cuba. Drawing from a wide geographic range (six essays from Cuba and others from North America and Europe), the collection explores a broad spectrum of topics, including the Cuban church, social policy, the economy, medicine, agriculture, housing, and human rights.
Most of the authors write as if the Cuban Revolution is in a proactive, problem-solving mode. Events since 1989, however, have shown the Cuban government to be increasingly reactive to hard times and external shocks. The “rectification process,” which was offered as the remedy for poor management, “low productivity, overstaffing, poor quality goods, wasteful use of resources, overspending, market and materialist mechanisms, price gouging, and a mercenary mentality” (p. xiii), now seems at best inadequate and at worst counterproductive. Severe structural economic problems cannot be solved by outlawing farmers’ markets and arresting a few “garlic millionaires.”
While not wholly uncritical of the Cuban government, many of the essays are overly sanguine about policies the Cuban government controls. For example, although the essay on human rights admits that “Cuba is in violation of international standards and treaties” in the areas of “procedural rights, political dissent, and treatment of political prisoners” (p. 69), the United States is criticized for asking Armando Valladares, “whose sole qualification” was imprisonment in Cuba, to head a delegation investigating the treatment of political prisoners (p. 72). The U.S. human rights position is dismissed as a “reluctance to accept the existence of a social system fundamentally different from its own” (p. 74). Given that the treatment of political prisoners has been a problem, who would know the problem better than one of its victims? Why, indeed, should there be any political prisoners 30 years after a revolution?
Evidence of the perishability of many of the essays permeates the volume. For example, Andréw Zimbalist writes, “the CMEA market provides a soft and reliable cushion [for Cuban sugar]” (p. 132). And Claes Brundenius asserts, “Cuba still stands out as a beacon in the Latin American darkness with an accumulated increase in per capita income of 33 percent compared to an average decline of 6.6 percent in Latin America on the average” (p. 145). Of course, that was before the economic depression that hit Cuba with the substantial unlinking of the Russian and Cuban economies. The hardships of the “zero option” had not yet been added to an already austere economy. Despite its perishability, what makes the book worth reading is that it provides a benchmark by which the magnitude of changes since 1989 can be gauged.
