The Cuban sugar economy in the Soviet era and after

Abstract

In the thirty years following the Cuban Revolution, its sugar economy experienced profound transformations in both marketing and production conditions. The greatest part of Cuba's sugar trade was redirected from the United States to new expanding markets in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. At the same time, the disintegration of the pre-revolutionary systems of labor organization provoked a crisis in labor supplies that compelled the massive adoption of mechanized harvesting techniques. Between 1959 and 1989, Cuba's sugar production grew by 40 percent and its sugar exports by a third. With the collapse of COMECON and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, the industry is caught in the eye of a storm in which old certainties no longer hold and from which it will not emerge without once again undergoing drastic adjustments. (c) 1994 Academic Press, Inc. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.