Tag Archives: Cuba

Cuba – A Development Success Story?

Cuba’s a good case study of  Socialist Model of Development that seems to have worked more effectively than most of the nel-liberal experiments in Latin America…. Today, Cuba’s HDI stats look like this….

chart

Human Development Index
Ranking 59
Health
Life expectancy at birth (years) 79.3
Education
Mean years of schooling (of adults) (years) 10.2
Income
GNI per capita in PPP terms (constant 2005 international $) (Constant 2005 international $) 5,539

Between 1980 and 2012 Cuba’s HDI rose by 0.8% annually from 0.626 to 0.780 today, which gives the country a rank of 59 out of 187 countries.  The HDI of Latin America and the Caribbean as a region is 0.741 today, placing Cuba above the regional average

In this nice infographic (hopefully it’ll work, although there’s probably too much info in it TBH) you can see the comparative development of Cuba compared to Bolivia, Columbia and Chile (three countries which were much more exposed to neoliberal policies – What you can see is that Cuba progresses more rapidly than both Bolivia and Columbia, but not as quickly as Chile. What you can also see (from about 5 years after 1990) is the negative affect the decline of Communist Russia had on Cuba’s development.

 

 

So it’s not easy to conclude outright support for any set of policies if just pure economic development is your goal. Although in this post – Cuba, A development Model which proved the developers wrong Jonataon Glennie outlines how a Socialist model of development has worked for Cuba since 1959… The general gist is that the means whereby Cuba developed involved much less human misery than the other three neoliberal examples above – As outlined by John Pilger in the excellent documentary War on Democracy).

To summarise Gelnnie’s article…

No other similar country adopted Cuba’s approach to development, and unlike in other Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Colombia and El Salvador, which experience widespread inequality and related problems, In Cuba, the extremes of opulence and misery are banished in favour of a generalised level of wealth, best described as “enough to get by”.

He notes that from the beginning the instinct at the heart of the revolution in 1959 was that slower wealth creation and limited political repression were a price worth paying for fairer distribution, and the consequent eradication of extreme poverty. It may not have been articulated as such, but that is how it has played out.

Castro’s leadership was the key factor in rapidly rising living standards for the poorest. In 1958, under the Batista dictatorship, half of Cuba’s children did not attend school. The literacy campaign begun by Castro in 1961 led, in 1970, to Unesco declaring Cuba the country with the highest primary and secondary school enrolment in Latin America. These development gains, among others, have continued to this day.

But what of the future?

But there have been two broad consequences. First, a generation of educated young people aspire to more in terms of living standards and life chances than their parents ever did. It is no coincidence that the older generation is more uncritically supportive of the revolution than the young – it knows what Cuba was like before.

Second, state-led development and investment is costly, especially when the international context becomes less favourable. Relying on goodwill, volunteering and accumulated capital has worked perhaps longer than anyone anticipated, but eventually wealth must be created and that, as the critics have always maintained, means a platform for the private sector to grow.