Reactions to the Market: Small Farmers in the Economic Reshaping of Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, and China by Laura J. Enríquez (review)

The subtitle of this book indicates an ambition that the author only partially fulfills. Enríquez's extensive research in Nicaragua and Cuba makes for two fascinating case studies of those countries' post-1990 transitions. She concedes at one point that Russia and China serve only "as a backdrop" (p. 60) for the two Latin American cases. The Russian and Chinese cases are analyzed via selected secondary literature and in considerably less detail.

This work rests on an analytical binary that the author outlines in a couple of tables. In the 1990s, according to Enríquez, Nicaragua and Russia began a "retreat from socialism" and embraced free-market policies, which in both places had a largely deleterious impact on small farmers. Cuba and China, on the other hand, "reconfigured" socialism with heterodox policies that permitted small agriculturalists to flourish. Invoking Polanyi's warning about liberalism's corrosive effects on rural livelihoods, Enríquez aims to draw broader conclusions not only about the socialist and quasi-socialist experiments of the twentieth century, but also about the debates among Marxists and between Marxists and populists over peasant differentiation and the agrarian question.

Enríquez provides considerable new material on the Nicaraguan and Cuban cases, much of it gleaned from surveys of farmers in four rural municipalities in each country (stratified by enterprise type, that is, cooperative members, independent smallholders, and so on) as well as interviews with key informants. The year 1990 marked an important transition in both places—in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas' electoral defeat and in Cuba with the disintegration of the COMECON socialist trade bloc and, one year later, of the USSR. Neoliberalism's impacts on post-1990 Nicaraguan farmers parallel those that affected small agriculturalists in many other developing countries in the same period: the weakening of public-sector supports such as credit, technical assistance, and price supports; a new emphasis on exports; comparative advantage and tariff reductions that undermined those producing for domestic markets; and an agrarian counter-reform that privatized many cooperatives and state farms. Enríquez grants that a few farmers found favorable niches in the new economy, including the domestic dairy market, and that many were able to substitute credit from NGOs for the loans they formerly received from the state development bank. Nonetheless, even though Nicaragua is, after Haiti, the most "NGO-ized" country in the Americas, she gives little attention to explaining why NGOs are so pervasive or how they operate.

In Cuba after 1990 the government liberalized and legalized many agricultural markets and downsized state farms, turning their assets over to cooperative production units. This involved a reorientation away from sugar exports and toward domestic markets, as well as new links between agriculture and tourism. These processes, as Enríquez makes clear, contributed to rising poverty and to exacerbating differences between regions and social strata. Nonetheless, she is insistent that Cuba has lower levels of poverty and inequality than any other Latin American country.

This book raises a number of questions that Enríquez either glosses over or ignores. Could Nicaragua, which she acknowledges was a mixed economy under the Sandinistas and which (although she does not mention it) the Soviets and Cubans never considered socialist, really engage in a "rapid retreat from socialism"? How in the late 1980s did economic policies, some decidedly liberal, contribute to undermining the Sandinistas' legitimacy? Enríquez mentions Cuba's food rationing system (p. 18), but does little to convey its enormous deficiencies or its maddening demands on consumers' patience and energy. While Cuba may have a lower level of poverty than other countries in the Americas, this is a very particular phenomenon, connected to an extraordinarily high social wage but accompanied by deteriorating infrastructure and housing stock, plummeting birth rates, and an exodus of the young, conditions...