Cuban Trips: 1993 and 2004

Cuba is distinctive among Latin American countries: 1) the most Spanish 2) while the most African nation, 3) the first and most profoundly U.S.-influenced, 4) an isolated nation due to the U.S. embargo and its centrally-planned economy, and 5) most international country when Cuba undertook military campaigns in Africa (Grenier and Perez, 2003).

To understand what we see in the world, we need to look behind the scenes, to view the invisible. In the case of Cuba, we are dealing with a "collapsed economy," similar to the formerly centrally-planned economies of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba lost 80 percent of its trade and U.S. $5 billion a year subsidies!

When I first traveled to Cuba in 1993 the worst aspects of this collapsed economy were event. Indeed, I took my bicycle because gasoline shortages were so extreme and, therefore, very little traffic in Havana. By 2004, on my second trip, the benefits of tourism (3 million tourists) and foreign investments from such countries as Mexico, Spain, Italy, Canada, and China, were very apparent in the many new and restored hotels, restaurants, lots of merchandise in dollar stores, and the great variety of foreign cars and lots of traffic!

The two diagrams below show my conception of the Cuban economy in these two very different circumstances: first, 1993 and then, 2004.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 02 March 2006.