I recently spent two weeks in Cuba, as a member of a 28-person multinational delegation of cooperative movement activists and academics, organized by the Center for Global Justice. We toured worker coops and conferred at the University of Havana and the Instituto de Filosofia, with many of the people involved in the reorganization of the Cuban economy and in economic/social theory. I and others of the delegation presented papers there.
As you might know, Cuba is reinventing their economy based on worker cooperatives in small enterprises, instead of the government trying to run the entire economy. They are still in the experimental stage, with most of the pilot programs located in Havana. They are giving over the existing enterprises to the workers already there, and have also opened the economy to new self-organized coops, and to self-employed businesses. If these are successful, Cuba will generalize the system throughout the country. Under this new plan, the government will directly operate only the heights of the economy. Cuba will continue socialist planning to promote social justice through market regulation and worker coops.
Here’s my paper, “Market Socialism in Yugoslavia and its Relevance to Cuba”, which I read on June 28, 2016, at the Universidad de Habana.
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