Customer Reviews

Portrait of Cuba

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A Different Portrait of Cuba....Its quite amusing that Cuba alledgedly has "no economy." Prior to the 1959 Revolution Cuba had experienced a period of sustained economic stagnation due primarily to the lack of growth in the US preferential sugar market and sluggish growth in the residual "world free market." Cuba had almost no engineers, no industrial base and few teachers or medical personnel. There was certainly no loss in so called "managerial professionals" at all!!! Sugar cane cutting, a major economic activity, was done completely by hand with about 370,000 professional cane cutters. For half the year, the dead season, they had no work. Mechanization in the entire sugar industry was minimal and modernising investments were small. This all changed dramatically after 1959. A sustained effort was made, with Soviet assistance, to mechanise the sugar industry and to industrialise the island, something that the UK Board of Trade had urged Colonel Batista to do in 1954. The UK Board of Trade had recommended Cuba introduce a series of protective tariffs and other measures in order to develop an industrial base and create new jobs. By 1980, about 90% of the Cuban sugar cane cutting was now done by the Cuban made KTP, a hybrid machine designed on the imported Australian Massey Ferguson machine and technologically downgraded to suit Cuban engineering standards. The Soviet Union built much of the factories needed for Cuba to begin the design and production of its own cane cutting machines. Most of the KTP component parts (70%) are manufactured in Cuba itself, a startling achievement. By the late 1980s Cuba had also designed and built a range of agricultural machinery including the Taino truck, a transport van for agricualtural produce. This was based on Spanish Pegaso technology and built with assistance from the GDR that is East Germany. By 1990 Cuba had also developed radar and telecommunications systems with assistance from Hungary, machine tools for sugar milling, various pieces of agricultural machinery, bio medical plants, factories producing munitions, medical research centres, factories producing light consumer goods and foodstuffs and an important computer industry, particularly in the area of software. Much of this industrialisation (e.g the yellow KTP Harvesters) was actually shown on NBC TV during the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1990, by Robert Bazell, then the science correspondent for the NBC news shows.

In terms of growth phases, Cuba experienced strong economic growth when foreign exchange was most abundant. Thus from 1971-5 and from 1981-5 the economy grew rapidly as foreign exchange was abundant and funded the required imports to complete investment plans for new or expanding industrial sectors. The economy also grew strongly in the years immediately following the revolution, from 1959-61 as redistribution measures (e.g land reform, the most sweeping in Latin America's history) increased the purchasing power of the population and hence quickly reduced any excess capacity in light industries such as those making foodstuffs. This led to a Balance of Payments Crisis and caused the 10 million ton "zafra" to become an absession as new imports could only be funded by increased exports. Unfortunately most works on Cuba totally neglect the island's technological revolution especially in agriculture and the structural transformation of the internal economy. Social and medical programmes are assumed to have been the only advancements made. However the outstanding sporting and military achievements of the island since 1959 merely add weight to the claim that by 1990 Cuba had been transformed from a backward agrarian economy facing prolonged stagnation into a much more dynamic industrialised economy. The economic problems Cuba has suffered since are threefold (i) The Collapse of 80% of her foreign trade thanks to the elimination of COMECON and The Soviet Bloc, a decision many of them have since come to severely regret as many of their factories have been destroyed to accomodate sweat shop re-export plants from West European investment, primarily West Germany and France; (ii) The transformation of Cuba's internal economy has not spilled over into a major structural change in the island's export base. That is the economy has remained dependent on agricultural exports and increasingly on tourist revenues many of which create increased imports as the hotels and travel trips require many different types imports from hard currency capitalist countries; (iii) the collapse of the Soviet Bloc plus the heightened US trade blockade has caused capital equipment to wear down even more quickly as spare parts and certain types of amchinery required to operate the factories etc cannot be attained via importing. Thus the hardship on the population intensifies as further factory slowdons or closures imply increased unemployment, a dilemma for a country used to near full employment.
Unfortunately most works such as those by Wayne Smith completely ignore the structural transformation of the Cuban Economy by the Revolution as well as the accompanying sporting and military successes that the island achieved. Inturn the tendency is that Cuba should return itself to a backward monopoly capitalist country and that the revolution has been an economic failure. This is despite the lack of any progressive successful economic model throughout Latin America. Whatever economic system Cuba has its living standards will not improve unlesss new more dynamic exports are steadily introduced into its export basket such as agricultural machinery, cane cutting machinery,bio technology and medical products, light consumer goods and computer software. The transformation of Cuba back to its past agrarian based monopoly capitalist system may please the US but it will lead to a sudden collapse in the living standards of most Cubans as social and medical programmes disappear and the land system is quickly returned to its monopolistic tradition. Income distribution will become highly skewed and mass unemployment will again become entrenched. These books would be better served if they provided an overview of the economic accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution and a rational blueprint for living standards to be improved upon by e.g new exports, rather than merely concluding that Cuba would be better off by returning to both the past monopoly dead end stagnation model and to the surrounding model of economic backwardness existing in the countries around Cuba.