This Issue

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.5.2.0095
• Published date: 01 October 2013
• Date: 01 October 2013
• Pages: 95-101
• Author: George Lambie

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

EDITORIAL

THIS ISSUE

George Lambie

This edition of IJCS has the common theme of reform and change in Cuba,

but addresses these issues from diverse perspectives. Two articles by the Cuban

economists José Luís Rodríguez and C. Juan Triana Cordovi examine the

economic and social dimensions of recent developments in the island. Lana

Wylie and Lisa Glidden question the notion of a ‘Cuban Spring’. Velia Cecilia

Bobes examines the ‘civil society’ debate and its implications and, f‌inally, Karen

S. Christian analyses the themes of gender and sexuality in a 2002 book by the

contemporary Cuban novelist Ena Lucía Portela.

José Luis Rodríguez, ‘The Recent Transformations in the Cuban

Economy’

Rodríguez, currently an analyst at the Centre for the Study of the World Economy

(CIEM) in Havana, comes to this subject with the immense hindsight and

experience he gained as Minister of Finance and then Minister of the Economy

during the period 1995–2009. Having played a major role in managing the

Cuban economy during the ‘Special Period’ and overseeing the island’s recovery

in the second half of the 1990s, he is especially qualif‌ied to make an informed and

objective assessment of the current changes. The article opens with the important

observation that these ‘transformations’ are not part of a ‘transition’, as in the

former communist countries, but an updating of the island’s socialist revolution

in response to prevailing circumstances. Consistent with the opening statement,

the author begins his analysis with the early trajectory of the revolution and

the internal and external challenges of building socialism in an underdeveloped

country. This gives a context for Cuba’s responses to the unprecedented problems

it faced in the ‘Special Period’ after the collapse of communism. The author

notes that in addition to the extraordinary, and sometimes undesirable, measures

that had to be taken to address the crisis, Cuba’s diff‌iculties were compounded

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