The Menace of Dependency: Struggling against Capitalist Development in Cuba

Fidel Castro, president of the Republic of Cuba since the 1960s.

While many Latin American nations resort to increasingly desperate bailout packages from international financial institutions to escape the threat of ‘underdevelopment’, the Caribbean island of Cuba shows that such Western development programs can actually lead to the very problems which they set out to solve.

In this four-part series Virgil Cameron examines the notion of development, exploring why the socialist state of Cuba has fervently resisted capitalist globalisation for the past 43 years and why neoliberal development could spell the end for true social development.

Part One: Introduction to Cuba

Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean, and is situated between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, just several hundred kilometres south of Florida, USA. For the past 500 years Cuba has had a history of colonial domination, exploitation and slavery imposed by powerful colonial occupiers, namely Spain and the USA (Sierra, 2002). Cuba’s history is also rich with acts of rebellion, revolt and revolution enacted by Cubans against their occupiers.

In 1959, Fidel Castro led a popular revolution in Cuba, overthrowing the Batista dictatorship. Castro’s revolutionary government imposed significant reforms to the social, economic and political functioning of the country. Cuba, declared a Communist state soon after the 1959 revolution, received significant financial and military support from the Communist Soviet Union. At the same time, during the height of the Cold War, a hostile relationship formed between the USA and Cuba, with the USA imposing an economic embargo on Cuba which discouraged all foreign trade or investment in Cuba, at the risk of prosecution by US courts. This hostile relationship and the US-led trade embargo still exist today.

These factors have been central to the formation of Cuba’s social, economic and political developments since 1959. With a state-controlled centrally-planned economy, and with the help of Soviet Russia, the Cuban government fostered a strong social welfare state. Despite the harsh conditions imposed on Cuba as a result of the US economic blockade, the Revolution’s concerted push for social reform has produced remarkable results in the past 43 years. For three decades, from the early 1960s until the late 1980s, the Cuban economy gained strength and the standard of living for all Cubans increased. During this time Soviet aid significantly propped up Cuba’s financial and social situation in the face of the international trade embargo on Cuba. The Soviet Union formed Cuba’s most significant trading partner from the early 1960s to the late 1980s.

However, with the collapse of Soviet Russia in the late 1980s, the Cuban economy slumped dramatically. Living standards in Cuba declined significantly in the early 1990s, with the introduction of tight rationing of food, energy and consumer products (BBC, 2002). As a result, the Cuban government shifted the focus of development programs in order to rebuild the Cuban economy for the country’s survival in the face of the enduring economic blockade, and the loss of Soviet support. Since the economic recession of the early 1990s, Cuba has experienced a slow economic recovery (USDS, 2002), while implementing development plans geared towards building a national infrastructure which can function independently of international financial aid.