The
Latin American Studies Association Annual recently concluded its XXXth International Congress, Toward a Third Century of Independence in Latin America, held this year in San Francisco, California. The Congress program may be accessed HERE. Many of the papers produced for the Congress
may be accessed HERE.
For the Congress, I presented a paper: Organizing Cuban Economic Enterprises in the
Wake of the Lineamientos—Between Corporation, Cooperatives and Globalization, the PowerPoint slides of which can be accessed here.
The Congress produced its
own controversy this year. It should
come as no surprise that the controversy involved the Cuban delegation to the
Conference. The U.S. government permitted
a number of Cuban academics to attend the Conference, including Mariela Castro,
the daughter of Cuban leader Raúl Castro and a leader in progressive movements
in Cuba on the rights of sexual minorities, and child health and welfare. See UPDATE: Mariela Castro's academic paper for LASA: "Sexual Education as State Policy in Cuba, 1959-Present" El Yuma, May 17, 2012. However, the U.S. government refused visas
for almost a dozen of the invited Cuban speakers. The reasons remain unclear.
La negativa de Estados Unidos a entregar visas de ingreso a 11 académicos cubanos que debían participar en un congreso, que comenzó este jueves 24, provocó protestas de sectores que en ambos países pugnan por el intercambio libre de ideas y conocimientos como vía hacia la solución del añejo conflicto bilateral. . . . Los participantes de la isla, de un grupo de más de 70 invitados, que no pudieron viajar son Carlos Alzugaray, Carmen Castillo, Soraya Castro, Olga Fernández, Rafael Hernández, Milagros Martínez, Esteban Morales, Carlos Oliva, Miriam Rodríguez, Oscar Zanetti, y Roberto Zurbano.” (Ivet Gonzalez, Visas en Discordia, Visiones de IPS, May 25, 2012).
In return, the Cuban delegation
made contact with its allies in the United States for community building
relating to the legal action against five Cubans charged by the U.S. government
with espionage activities.
I participated in a panel,
entitled, What Does The Future Hold For
Cuba?: The Lineamientos, Guidelines For Economic Change In Cuba and Cuba's Vi
Congress, which was held on May 25, 2012.
My contribution considered the approach of the Cuban state to the issue
of liberalizing economic activity within the framework of Marxist Leninist
state ideology in the shadow of markets driven economic globalization. It
examined the way in which Cuba has sought to bend to the logic of economic
globalization by permitting localized but tightly controlled small scale fields
of private activity, while organizing the remaining portions of economic life
either under state owned enterprises or state managed projects. Individuals are denied the authority to
aggregate capital by organizing corporations.
But Cuba has begun to attempt to elaborate a theory of cooperatives as a
means of small-scale aggregation of labor that might produce some of the
benefits of corporate activity, without drawing control of significant amounts
of capital away from the direct supervision of the state. The cooperative,
especially, has the potential for providing an interesting and useful
alternative to corporate forms that may not only shift focus from capital to
labor in economic activity, but beyond what the Cuban state apparatus wishes
for this model, cooperatives may also provide a vehicle for stakeholder
engagement that is more in accord with the movements toward corporate social,
cultural and economic accountability in emerging international normative
frameworks. These approaches are not merely a localized effort to avoid
globalization. Rather, the Cuban have sought to build an ideological structure
around these efforts and apply them in the construction of regional economic
relations, especially through ALBA, the socialist regional trade organ.
What follows is the paper
title and abstract. The SLIDES of the presentation may be ACCESSED HERE.
Paper Title: Organizing Cuban Economic Enterprises in the
Wake of the Lineamientos—Between Corporation, Cooperatives and Globalization
Short Abstract: Since the adoption of the Limeamientos in
2011, Cuba has embarked on its own version of economic experimentation within
its own sense of its Marxist Leninist organizational principles. Some of the elements of this experimentation
have been widely discussed and criticized—from the efforts to produce a rigidly
controlled class of proprietorship businesses, to the limited and highly
regulated efforts to open agricultural cultivation to farmers. Less well
treated are the institutional forms in which economic development is to be
undertaken. The Lineamientos strictly
limited the availability of the corporate form to state owned enterprises, or
enterprises involving the state and foreigners. The rationale is that the Marxist
Leninist foundation of the state would be undermined if the corporate form was
made available except through the state to Party apparatus. In its place, other, more limited vehicles
for aggregation of capital in private ventures have been suggested. Among the most important are cooperatives,
put forward as an alternative to the corporate form for individuals. This paper examines the consequences of the
current approach to the creation and management of economic enterprises within
Cuba. The paper first describes the
universe of organizational forms available for the conduct of economic
activities within Cuba. It then
considers the cooperative as an alternative to the corporate form, suggesting
both its benefits and its limitations, even within the confines of Cuban
political ideology. The paper concludes
with an analysis of the Cuban approach to private capital aggregation in light
of Cuba’s regional trade structures and the realities of globalization. It suggests that the institutional
limitations of the current Cuban approach will substantially inhibit the growth
of private economic activity and is unnecessary even within the ideological
confines of the Lineamientos
The paper will be posted soon.
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