Cuba under Raúl Castro: Assessing the Reforms by Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Jorge Pérez-López (review)

Distinguished economists and pioneering scholars Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Jorge Pérez-López have written the most wide-ranging, provocative, and deeply researched discussion available of the nature, political underpinnings, and impact of Raúl Castro’s unprecedented economic reforms. Eminently accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience, Cuba under Raúl Castro: Assessing the Reforms relies on a historically informed approach that elucidates how recent policies form part of a larger pattern of policy making that has been in place since Cuba’s turn toward Communist Party–planned development in 1961. Like these authors’ previous works, especially the contributions of Mesa-Lago in the 1970s and 1980s, this book exposes much of Cuba’s day-to-day realities by excavating statistical data that is extremely difficult to obtain in a country with long traditions of treating economic indicators and observably negative policy outcomes not as issues for scholarly or open debate but as matters of national security.

By their own admission, Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López affect a refreshingly light interpretive touch in tone and style, seeking to provide a “balanced and objective” analysis, free of the usual political agendas that so marked evaluative studies throughout the revolution (xv). Thus, they allow their rich array of quantitative and qualitative sources (most of which were generated by the Cuban government and analysts on the island) to speak for themselves. The result is a disturbing portrait of a government that refuses to grasp the fundamental lessons of policy decisions, even when those decisions planted the seeds of economic decay and overall impoverishment in the very behaviors and resistance of citizens whose labor and attitudes it sought to control. Through a detailed, chronological synthesis covering the period 1959–2006, the authors demonstrate how often the “political logic [of maintaining a monopoly on rule] prevailed over economic logic, even if it resulted in deterioration of economic and living standards” (25).

Specifically, Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López prove that new rules governing the most essential aspects of life in Cuba reflect an extraordinary degree of consistency with regard to purpose, goals, and outcome, if not the methods and justifications, adopted by the revolutionary elite over the past fifty years. Repeatedly, Cuba’s leaders have entangled development in a dizzying back-and-forth cycle of adopting what the authors call “idealistic” (anti-market) policies that shored up political stability by reducing or entirely eliminating citizens’ economic autonomy from the state to induce loyalty and periodic turns to “pragmatist” (market-oriented) strategies. The latter happened whenever the idealist approach failed and economic conditions reached a critical stage or provoked intense popular discontent (11–24). As Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López recognize, the unexpected ascent of Raúl Castro to the pinnacle of authority was greeted by a rising tide of hopeful expectations. Raúl himself buoyed this reaction by calling for feedback from state enterprises and agencies through mass meetings meant to generate lists of perceived problems and possible solutions. Public response was electric. From October to December 2007, five million citizens presented more than one million suggestions over the course of 215,687 assemblies (172). Yet Raúl Castro’s characterization of the meetings’ goals, as well as his own advisers’ interpretations of results, was deeply emblematic of how the revolutionary state has traditionally incorporated and reacted to critiques from below: “[T]he purpose of the meetings was not for us to learn about problems; we were already aware of most of them … [and] some of the suggestions reflect a lack of information, particularly those in the economic sphere” (Raúl Castro, quoted at 173).

At the core, Raúl’s reforms focused on reducing state expenditures and increasing efficiency by broadening self-employment, liberalizing real estate laws, and attracting further foreign investment. These policies were coupled with mass layoffs; a reduction in social welfare; and most...