Book Reviews

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.14.1.0181
• Published date: 05 July 2022
• Date: 05 July 2022
• Pages: 181256-184
• Author: Marcos Antonio da Silva

BOOK REVIEWS 181

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Hiram Marquetti Nodarse, Las crisis en el desarrollo económico de Cuba1.

Buenos Aires/México: CLACSO/CALAS, 2021. Pbk. 256 pp. ISBN 978–987-

722–871-7

Marcos Antonio da Silva2

The economic development of all nations has a remarkable complexity, in which

various causes and elements are combined, and a dynamic in which cycles of

growth, crisis and stagnation are interspersed, demonstrating the numerous

challenges for sustainable development, overcoming imbalances and crises that

emerge over time.

In the case of Cuba, the dynamics related to recent economic development are

undoubtedly associated with the revolutionary process and the structural trans-

formations it sought to develop with the implementation of an internal economic

policy marked by state action, in which it sought to combine universality and

egalitarianism, and of an international position, associated with revolutionary

ideals, which led to a redefinition of its international ties and to a practical

dependence on the ex-USSR. This relationship, although ensuring survival, secu-

rity and providing an important boost to the country’s development, revealed,

with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, its limits and imbalances, generating the

deepest economic crisis in Cuba’s history.

Since the end of the last century, the Cuban economy has developed an unsta-

ble trajectory, based on the dichotomy of crisis and reforms, which combines

cycles of growth and stagnation (or even retrogression), showing the persistence

of a crisis (or crises) in Cuban economic development, with multidimensional

impacts that affect the entire society and can be considered a fundamental com-

ponent of its recent history.

Although it has numerous contours (political, social, educational, cultural), it

is in the economic field that one can perceive the nature and impacts of such a

crisis and the implementation of fundamental alternatives that might affect the

future of the Caribbean island and of its revolutionary process.

To face the deep economic crisis of the 1990s, the Cuban leadership initially

promoted a reorientation of the country’s economic policy and the adoption of

1 Available in: http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/se/20210427041815/Las-crisis-y-

su-incidencia-en-el-desarrollo.pdf

2 Doctor in Studies on the Integration of Latin America (PROLAM/USP). Professor

at the Postgraduate Program in Sociology (PPGS) and at the Social Sciences course

at the Federal University of Grande Dourados (UFGD). He was a member of the

Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Latin American Studies (LIAL).

DOI:10.13169/intejcubastud.14.1.0181