Cuba Adapting To a Post Soviet World
UnpublishedSeptember/October
1995
Volume:
29
Number:
2
Article
Philip Brenner & Peter Kornbluh
While recent events provided Clinton with an opportunity to fundamentally rethink U.S. policy, he let the moment slip by. Instead, U.S. policy toward Cuba continues to be held hostage to two domestic political concerns: money and votes.
In few places were the reverberations of the collapse of the Soviet bloc more strongly felt than Cuba. Over the previous three decades, this island nation of ten million people had enjoyed extremely favorable terms of trade with the Soviet Union, which fueled its remarkable social development.
Manuel Pastor, Jr. & Andrew Zimbalist
The holding of dollars has been decriminalized, state farms have been turned into cooperatives, the legal space for self-employment has been expanded, and agricultural commodities are being sold in markets. The political and economic consequences of all this remain unclear.
Solidarity and the Democracts Van Gosse's article, "Active Engagement: The Legacy of Central America Solidarity" [March/April, 1995] contains tremendous illusions about the Democratic Party that can't help but be harmful to solidarity move- ments, and to Latin American liber- ation forces that seek to base any kind of policy upon them. Ac- cording to Gosse, "the Democrats never stopped fighting with Reagan over Central America.
Mirta Rodríguez Calderón
People outside Cuba-friends and enemies alike-spend their time speculating about how much we spend on the black market to eat, bathe, and wash our clothes, and whether, indeed, all of us take part in clandestine trade. Many people outside of Cuba enjoy imagining what life is like for us in this "special period."
LETELIER ASSASSIN STILL NOT BEHIND BARS SANTIAGO DE CHILE, AUGUST 2, 1995 Chilean President Eduardo Frei and current army chief and former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet met for an hour on August 1 to discuss civilian-mili- tary relations.
Prominent Cubans associated with the revolution ponder the country's future, and offer their assessments of the need for economic and political reforms. Their differing viewpoints reflect the internal debate taking place within Cuba at this key juncture.
The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy by Marifeli Perez-Stable, Oxford University Press, 1993, 236 pp., $23 (cloth).
FR
The murders which followed protests of Mexico City's decision to end Ruta 100 of the public bus service, are indicative of the PRI's corruptive tactics as it loses grasp of its political legitimacy.
Philip Brenner & Peter Kornbluh
Looking beyond crude electoral calculations, a number of Clinton's foreign-policy specialists have pushed internally for a moderate relaxation of sanctions against Cuba, and a shift toward a pol- icy of more positive engagement. Since mid-1993, a behind-the-scenes debate has taken place over lift- ing specific parts of the embargo, implementing what U.
Sandinista comandante Doris Tijerino, Cuban-American scholar Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Argentine social historian Carlos Vilas and Mexican cartoonist Rius reflect upon "Cuba" in the political imagination.
Jon Elliston
Once marginalized from the Cuba policy debate, moderate and liberal Cuban Americans are taking their case to Washington at a a time when the struggle to define U.S. relations with the island is at its most contentious point.
Carmen Diana Deere
Two major changes have taken place in Cuban agricultural policy over the past two years. First, in September, 1993, the government announced that Cuba's huge state-farm sector was to be turned into a network of workers' cooperatives, thus ending the leadership's long-term commitment to state farms as "the highest form of socialist agriculture.
Deidre McFadyen
The values that the revolution inculcated have proven more enduring than the economic structure upon which they were based. The government's uneven application of free-market remedies are, however, chipping away at those very values.