Cuban Communism, 1959-2003 (review)

This is the 11th edition of Cuban Communism, and from its title, one would expect it to be updated to the year 2003. But one would be disappointed. The previous edition, the 10th, was published in 2000. Only 8 of the 39 chapters in the latest edition were written or updated after that, and several of those are seriously out of date. There is not a word, for example, in Jorge F. Pérez-López's chapter "Cuba's Stalled Reforms" about the Helms-Burton Act and its effect on the Cuban government's decisions. Yet the chapter was written in 2001; the Helms-Burton Act was passed in 1996, and many analysts attribute Cuba's decision to slow the reform process to its passage.

That causal relationship is ignored or distorted by other authors as well. In his chapter "Cuba: Without Subsidies," for example, Jaime Suchlicki implies that the reforms ended before passage of Helms-Burton.

But I was in Havana in January of 1996, that is, before Helms-Burton, and was told by everyone I interviewed in the Economy Ministry and various other government agencies that the reforms were marching forward and that the Small Business Law, the next major step, would be approved that year. I was there again several months later, after passage of Helms-Burton, to find a dramatically changed outlook. The Small Business Law, I was told, would be put on the shelf and many of the other reforms postponed. Why? Because, several friends confided, the passage of Helms-Burton had given the hardliners the upper hand. They were now arguing to Fidel that, given this new economic aggression against Cuba, the brakes should be applied to the reform process.

And again on the question of timeliness, Susan Kaufmann Purcell, writing in 1998 ("Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy"), concludes that the declining growth rate caused by Helms-Burton "will leave the Castro government with no alternative but to undertake a new round of economic reforms."

But five years later, by the time of this new edition's publication, no such new round of reforms had begun. Had she updated her chapter to 2003, she might not have been so optimistic, for the same factors that caused the brakes to be applied—that is, reaction to Helms-Burton—are as alive now as they were then.

One of the most out-of-date chapters is the one by Tim Golden, "Health Care in Cuba," written in 1994. It describes a situation that has changed significantly over the past ten years, yet it is presented as originally written. Golden himself is even described as a New York Times correspondent stationed in Havana, when in fact he has not been in Havana for years.

All of which leads to the question: Why come out with a new edition if you really have nothing new to say? Chapters on past history of course need not be changed, but one would expect chapters such as Josep M. Colomer's "Forecasting Institutional Change in Cuba," Jorge Domínguez's "Why the Castro Regime Has Not Fallen," Michael Radu's "The United States and Cuba after Castro," and various others to have been updated to reflect the situation in 2003. They were not. This, then seems to be largely a matter of selling an old book with a new cover.