Cuba's Experiments with Co-operativism and Solidarity Economies

Abstract

Cuba, arguably the last of the socialist countries spawned by the great revolutions of the 20th century still surviving, is now in a period of change and transition. While global commentators show a surge of interest in Cuba in the aftermath of the passing away of the Maximum Leader Fidel Castro (El Commandante) and the fast-approaching transition of power to a post-Castro generation (Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López 2018), within Cuba the debate has been ongoing at least since the sudden crisis it faced in the early 1990s following the precipitous collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, Cuba's only patrons and trading partners. The sudden implosion of what has since been called ‘20th-century socialism' almost everywhere (China and a few others also transitioning into forms of capitalism) forcefully brought home major deficits in that model. For Cuba, now facing near collapse and even mass starvation, the need to rethink and reform its socialist system was not just a theoretical or ideological issue, but one of its very survival. Cubans were forced to seriously address the issue of how to reform its system in order to put it on a more sustainable basis. But even as the public debates and rethinking began, Cuba quickly launched various reforms, especially during what Fidel Castro called a ‘Special Period in time of peace' (the special period) in the early 1990s, mostly aimed at economic survival, 2 and with such success that the immediate crisis was largely overcome in just a few years. But the end of the special period saw not a weakening but an intensification of the debate, as the need for more far-reaching changes to the Cuban model became widely recognised in the country. At the same time, Cuba's leaders, policymakers and intellectuals (and the majority of its people, from all the evidence I have been able to find) are boldly struggling to sustain the country's Human Development (HD) achievements, 221and the core values of the revolution—social justice, human dignity for all its citizens, and freedom from hunger—and to resist the forces that are at work to turn Cuba into a marginal partner in the global neoliberal capitalist system. In this task, they feel emboldened by the growing disillusionment with the neoliberal system (nowhere more so than among its own neighbours in Latin America) and its disastrous effects across the world. These include increasing concentration of wealth within and across countries unseen since the 1930s, a billion people in entrenched poverty and hunger, and environmental degradation reaching unsustainable levels, all of these well researched and documented by scholars such as Picketty (2014).