Last night at my blog, I
made a post, expanded from a
Quora answer I wrote late in December of 2015, talking about Cuba's lost chances. Someone had written a question wondering if Cuba proves that Communism worked. Could it stand as an example for the Third World It could not, I argued, mainly because Cuba before Castro was an advanced society with high levels of human and economic development, and because Cuba after Castro simply coasted.
PBS'
synopsis notes the fatal flaw in Cuba's prosperity, which was distributed very unevenly and helped to create a pre-revolutionary situation.
Cuba's capital, Havana, was a glittering and dynamic city. In the early part of the century the country's economy, fueled by the sale of sugar to the United States, had grown dynamically. Cuba ranked fifth in the hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, second in per capita ownership of automobiles and telephones, first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. The literacy rate, 76%, was the fourth highest in Latin America. Cuba ranked 11th in the world in the number of doctors per capita. Many private clinics and hospitals provided services for the poor. Cuba's income distribution compared favorably with that of other Latin American societies. A thriving middle class held the promise of prosperity and social mobility.
There were, however, profound inequalities in Cuban society -- between city and countryside and between whites and blacks. In the countryside, some Cubans lived in abysmal poverty. Sugar production was seasonal, and the macheteros -- sugarcane cutters who only worked four months out of the year -- were an army of unemployed, perpetually in debt and living on the margins of survival. Many poor peasants were seriously malnourished and hungry. Neither health care nor education reached those rural Cubans at the bottom of society. Illiteracy was widespread, and those lucky enough to attend school seldom made it past the first or second grades. Clusters of graveyards dotted the main highway along the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, marking the spots where people died waiting for transportation to the nearest hospitals and clinics in Santiago de Cuba.
This 1966
New York Review of Books exchange of letters on the Cuban revolution makes Cuba's relative advancement clear: "In 1953, not a particularly good year for the Cuban economy, Cuba’s per-capita income of $325 was higher than that of Italy ($307), Austria ($290), Spain ($242), Portugal ($220), Turkey ($221), Mexico ($200), Yugoslavia ($200), and Japan ($197)".
Ward and Devereux's 2010 study
"The Road not taken: Pre-Revolutionary Cuban Living Standards in Comparative Perspective" (PDF format) makes more detailed claims: "On the eve of the revolution, incomes were 50 to 60 percent of European levels. They were among the highest in Latin America at about 30 percent of the United States. In relative terms, Cuba was richer earlier on. Income per capita during the 1920s was in striking distance of Western Europe and the Southern United States. After the revolution, Cuba slipped down the world income distribution. Current levels of income per capita appear below their pre-revolutionary peaks." Notwithstanding criticism of these figures--Ward and Devereux do seem to account for price levels, contrary to
Louis Proyect's claims--they seem valid. Cuba on the eve of the revolution was a high-income Latin American society, fully bearing comparison with the Southern Cone and Venezuela, even much of Europe.
What does this mean about the success of Cuba under socialism? Probably the most noteworthy element of Cuba's post-revolutionary history is that of economic stagnation and relative decline. Cuba has fallen behind spectacularly, not just behind its western European peers but behind Latin America as well. Latin America's high-income countries have had a chequered growth history, but even these, Cuba's peers, have done better: Wages and living standards in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile are substantially higher. Even in the context of the Caribbean, Cuba's geographic peers, Cuba's performance has been patchy, with the Dominican Republic
making lasting gains. Blogger Noel Maurer has
linked to a 2013 counterfactual study suggesting that, by 1970, Cuba's GDP per capita was depressed by half.
What happened? One
counterfactual analysis suggests that Cuba's economy began underperforming badly in 1959, the moment of the revolution. Ward and Devereux suggest, ironically enough, that it is only by the late 1950s that the Cuban economy had completed its
long, slow recovery from the devastating impact of US sugar tariffs imposed in the early 1930s. (Cuba, they suggest, may have seen little net economic growth since the 1920s!) Of all the economies in the world to be transformed into autarkic socialist states, Cuba's highly-export dependent economy may have been among the least suited.
All this relates to an interesting question: What would Cuba have been like absent the Castro takeover? The question of how this takeover is avoided is key--a timeline where Batista never comes to power is different from a timeline where different rebels take over, for instance. It's plausible to me that Cuba would have stayed in the high-income club of Latin American countries, and that it would be likely to share in their decline relative to their North Atlantic peers. If anything, the domination of Cuba's economy by sugar cane exports would make Cuba's economy more vulnerable than Argentina's, or even Venezuela's. The relative weakness of constitutional government in Cuba, compared to Venezuela or even the Southern Cone, would be another factor aiming against a shiny happy Cuba. The most plausible outcome of a no-Castro timeline could well be a substantially wealthier, but substantially more unstable and unequal, Cuba.
Thoughts?