Corruption in Cuba: Castro and Beyond (review)

This excellent book covers four broad themes. The first two chapters present a synthetic review of the theoretical and comparative empirical scholarship on corruption. They draw from political science and economics and the comparative experiences of former communist Europe. They identify the determinants of corruption, its features, and its effects. They situate Cuba within the comparative political economy of institutions and incentives under socialism, rather than employing Latin America as the reference set.

The third chapter narrates the roots of corruption in Cuba from Spanish colonial times to the eve of revolutionary victory in 1959. This chapter concludes, "republican Cuba was burdened with a deeply ingrained tradition of corruption forged over four centuries of colonial rule" (85). Chapters 4 and 5 assess the nature, level, and determinants of corruption in socialist Cuba, especially since 1990—that is, after the collapse of communist Europe and the introduction of limited market-oriented economic reforms in Cuba. The last two chapters speculate thoughtfully about corruption during a hypothesized Cuban transition toward democratic politics and a market economy, drawing from the comparative empirical political economy of former socialist Europe.

The authors' review of the scholarly literature draws out a framework pertinent to the development of corruption in Cuba since 1990. The authors emphasize the monopoly power of the state over most of the Cuban economy, the extraordinary official discretion in policymaking, and the lack of means to hold officials accountable. Cuba features a weak civil society, government ownership and operation of nearly all the mass media (church publications excepted), and single-party rule.

Because field research in Cuba is impossible on this topic, the authors draw from many printed sources but cannot specify levels or trends of corruption in Cuba. They convincingly show, however, that corruption practices have become widespread. The government punishes culprits but enacts few institutional changes to address these matters. The authors highlight administrative corruption (drawing on World Bank assessments of corruption) but note that Cuba may be on the brink of "state capture" by the managers that run autonomous state-owned enterprises who could seize these firms, if "insider" privatization were to prevail as it did in Russia.

The authors emphasize the description of the institutions and practices of corruption in Cuba through the location of hard-to-find valuable evidence; their focus is not methodology, however. Because they cannot apply a research design to assess whether cultural or institutional explanations are more effective, they leave unresolved the competing explanations posed by the opening three chapters. One missed opportunity is the inattention to the relative impact of marketization on corruption. An unexplored hypothesis is that monetary corruption, though not abuse of power, declined in Cuba's revolutionary 1960s, only to reappear as market practices were re-introduced. The authors emphasize the contribution of the state and its practices to corruption but forego consideration of whether the trend toward the market economy was also a cause of the growth in corrupt practices.

Written in accessible prose, this scholarly work helps us to understand the comparative patterns and determinants of corruption and significantly deepens our knowledge of Cuba as power transfers from Fidel to Raúl Castro.