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I am delighted to share the program for the 2024 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. It will be held at Florida International University (Miami, Florida), 18-20 October 2024. The conference will be co-sponsored by FIU’s Cuban Research Institute. During two-and-a-half days, scholars and professionals present papers and participate in roundtable discussions (Details here).
In this post I share the discussion draft of my presentation at the conference. It is entitled "Cuba—The Art and Theory of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline." My object was to consider ways of approaching the following questions:
Might it be possible to describe the current state of Cuba as an effort to perfect a stable state of misery? Can one better understand the core premises of its political-economic model as pointing to the perfection of administrative apparatus that oversees this state of misery? Can what to outsiders appears to be a state of wretchedness be instead understood from the inside as the fulfillment of a vision of social relations that relies for its ordering on maintaining just enough wretchedness to divert popular attention from the political (and its ruling apparatus) to the business of surviving; a set of social relations en el que lo principal es resolver (in which the principal objective is to solve, to fix, or to overcome the immediate challenges of finding enough to eat and to live well enough)? And might that stability of misery be a condition that suits the rest of the world, which contributes to the maintenance of this implementation of the moral judgments embedded in the Cuban political-economic model?
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Though these questions have special resonance for Cuba in its current state of historical development, there is much here that might inform conditions in other developing states. The abstract provides a little more detail:
Abstract: The general default position of much commentary on the State of Cuba’s political model tends to be premised on an assumption of instability in need of repair. For decades some of the most creative minds on the planet have devoted tremendous amount of creative capital on solutions to the Cuban problem. This contribution suggests that what appears to be a state of instability and flux is actually becoming a stable state of misery. That stable state, in turn, suggests that control can be maintained as much on the basis of a premise of prosperity as it can on the basis of a reality of misery just challenging enough to keep a population really well managed and the political system reasonably well ordered. It is to consideration of hints about the nature and character of this stable state that this essay is directed. These hints are organized in three parts. The first, the ideological element, considers the way that that morality of consumerism developed over the decades by Fidel Castro and incorporated into the organic documents of the Cuban political economic model helped shape an approach to the role of material goods in a “revolutionary” society in ways that made collective misery—at some level—both tolerable and strategically useful. The second looks to the political-economic element. That is, it considers the ways in which the underlying consumerist morality of the political-economic model finds expression in the practices and policies of the State apparatus guided by the Party and its own governance apparatus. The contribution considers this from the interests of three significant groups with substantial engagement with Cuba. The first include states and other foreign lenders. The second includes the apparatus of the Cuban state itself and the elaboration of a dual character economy. And the third touches on Cuba’s projection into the world, especially in the shadow of its quite useful relationship with the United States The third then considers the utility of periodic popular explosion as the disciplinary factor for gauging the limits of misery tolerable by the body politic. This inverts the usual discourse of popular protest as a means of governance rather than in its more usual construction as some sort of pre-revolutionary signaling of the end of the current hegemony of the political-economic model that has shaped Cuban governance since the mid-1970s.
These elements are woven together through twelve vignettes-- vignettes that are both in search of a theoretical framework and that also suggest its form. The first three weave together the moral order foundations supporting the construction of a robust and stable state of misery, and its transposition to political ideology and its response to and identification of its inverse (and enemy). The second set of five vignettes spotlight key aspects of the way that theory finds its way into the constitution of the policy frameworks through which the state fulfills what it has determined is the best form of application of the principles that make Cuban Marxist Leninism itself and in the actions of foreign states that collude in the enterprise. The last four vignettes add the dialectical element to the system. The contemporary forms of that engagement manifested after COVID with the 11 July 2021 protests. But more than that, the dialectic merges protests as a form of dialectic conversation with the (and perhaps measured by) the willingness of the state apparatus to widen or narrow the aperture of toleration of the non-state sector.
Comments and engagements always welcome. The discussion draft may be accessed here (SSRN). The Abstract, table of contents and introduction follow below.
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