The Ideological Challenges of Cuban Socialism

Abstract

As Cuba updates its economy by expanding the role of markets and the private sector, the issue of ideology is center stage. The Conceptualización del modelo económico y social cubano de desarrollo socialista unveiled at the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 2016 lays out a vision for a "sustainable and prosperous" socialism, but it incorporates elements of what appear to be two contending ideological positions within the leadership: the view that the reforms must go faster and farther in order to promote economic growth and the view that they should go more slowly to minimize the social and political costs of change. Thus the Conceptualización calls for the growth and juridical recognition of the private sector but only within a system in which state property is predominant and no one can accumulate wealth. It calls for expanding the role of markets but strictly regulating them within a system in which state planning directs the economy. It calls for wages to be proportionate to the productivity of work, though that will inevitably generate inequality, while promising that no one will be left behind. Despite their disparate subjects, all of the books under consideration here share an interest in the ideology of Cuba's revolutionary project-its origins, core values, challenges, and expression in everyday life. Steve Cushion sees the roots of Cuban socialism in the radicalism of the prerevolutionary labor movement led by the Popular Socialist Party (the pre-1959 communists). Katherine Gordy explores the revolution's core values of equality, nationalism, and political unity as their meaning and practice have evolved from the 1960s to the present. The contributors to the volume edited by Jorge I. Domínguez et al. examine the social impacts of Cuba's economic reforms, the challenge those reforms pose to core social values, and the government's policy response. Danielle