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Happy to share the pre-publication draft of my essay, Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline. It will be published later this year in Volume 13 of the Penn State Journal of Law and International Affairs. The article considers the complexities of Cuban Caribbean Marxism and the difficulties of pursuing ideological purity that is rooted in a vision cemented in place in time and place. That determination has produced something that resembles stable state of misery built on the notion of perpetual self sacrifice against an unrelenting set of adversarial conditions. Its echoes of American Puritanism (in the religious rather than political sphere) of the early colonial period in New England may be unavoidable.
Here is the abstract:
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.
The introduction of the paper follows. It may be accessed here
Larry Catá Backer[1]
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.
Tale of Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Ideological Element
2.1 Vignette 1: Fidel’s Refrigerators.
2.2 Vignette 2: The State Ideology in the Shadow of Consumption and Globalization.
2.3 Vignette 3: Fidel’s “Children” and the Institutionalization of Ideologies of Misery.
3. The Political-Economic Element
3.1 Vignette 4: The Phoenix of Stability From out of Disaster.
3.2 Vignette 5: The Governance of Misery.
3.3 Vignette 6: Welcome to the Hunger Games and Global Lenders.
3.4 Vignette 7: The Hunger Games Part 2—The Spy-Friends Edition.
3.5 Vignette 8: The Hunger Games Part 3—The ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ Edition.
4. Popular explosion as the Disciplinary Factor
4.1 Vignette 9: The Edges of Misery and the Misery of the Edges--11 July 2021.
4.2 Vignette 10; Even Protests can be a Leninist Instrument.
4.3 Vignette 11: The Toleration f the Intolerable and the Search for a Stable State.
4.4 Vignette 12: The Swingling Pendulum.
5. Conclusion
1. Introduction
Nuestro pueblo será tanto más grande cuanto más grandes sean los obstáculos que tiene delante; más hablará de nuestro pueblo la historia cuanto más dificultades tenga que vencer; más justicia le hará el porvenir cuanto más se le calumnie hoy, y solo podrá decirse que aquí se organizó una sociedad donde todos los pueblos del mundo pudieron venir a aprender lo que era justicia, lo que era democracia, y que supo defenderla y supo sostenerla, y, aunque no sabemos lo que el destino nos depare, sí tenemos la seguridad suficiente para decir que nuestra Revolución triunfará porque sabremos defenderla, o que nuestro pueblo perecerá si es preciso perecer para defenderla (APLAUSOS).[2]
In the third week of October 2024 power went out all over Cuba.[3] In the second week of January 2025, Cuban authorities appeared to bargain with the United States in a deal that saw the Cuban authorities agree to release over five hundred people jailed in the aftermath of the July 2021 protests in return for the U.S. government’s action to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.[4] What was once deemed to be an unavoidable sign of the collapse of a system (the collapse of the electrical system),[5] or an extraordinary bargaining with the United States for political and economic benefit, are both now understood as the signs of the extraordinary times and the extraordinary tests that the government, and its political-economic system, face.[6]
The notion of sacrifice has been a foundational element of the equally foundational principles around which the ideal of the Cuban revolution has been developed from the time of the establishment of the Cuban revolutionary government in 1959.[7] Sacrifice can be understood as operating at two levels.[8] On the level of the individual, the idea of communal sacrifice[9] for the preservation of a political-economic, moral or other systems of social relations for which mass solidarity is essential solidary appears deeply embedded in the organization and integrity of social relations.[10] But the State and its apparatus must also make sacrifices. Closely related to the notion of sacrifice is that of pragmatic engagement, wherein the State itself must make sacrifices to protect the integrity of its political economic model. That, in essence, has been the policy of the State (under the guidance of the Cuban Communist Party) since the Cuban Special Period of the 1990s.[11] Reform is experimental, complementary, and temporary, eroded as the level of individual privation is adjusted upwards of a triggering minimum level of tolerance.[12]
It is in the cause of sacrifice that a population is said to be able to endure a substantial amount of privation to ensure survival and ultimately the realization of the goals for which privation is demanded. And it is for the preservation of the political-economic project that achieved its definitive form in the 1970s, that the State can also make sacrifices. While popular sacrifice involves physical privation; State sacrifice involves the “temporary” institution of reform that appears to the connection between mass sacrifice of this kind (privation) and popular misery, then, both obvious and inevitable under those conditions for which sacrifice and the endurance of misery is demanded. The mediating lever of mass privation is the willingness of the State to deviate from the strictest application of its political-economic model—just enough State sacrifice to prevent a state of mass misery with politically explosive effect.
Cuba has endured states of sacrifice, and of misery, of varying intensity for decades. The revolutionary government prepared the Cuban people for that state months after its establishment. It has been especially significant since the early 1990s in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. That has produced a rich literature aimed at aiding Cuba out of its perpetual state of sacrifice, and if the constancy of misery that it produces, as well as a perhaps richer literature, a literature of wonderment, the object of which is to try to understand how the state and its government can continue to exist in a relatively stable form given the conditions of privations that appear to be the default setting for national economic conditions.[13] Despite expectations that intensified after the fall of the Soviet Union,[14] neither the government of Cuba, nor its political-economic model has ended.[15]
Nonetheless, the constancy of sacrifice producing perpetual or near perpetual states of misery suggests a limiting principle.[16] The usual approach to states of misery is to invoke its more ancient meaning—a state of grievous affliction or a condition of external unhappiness.[17] But in its Spanish or more precisely Latin sense of miseria, one also understands it to invoke states of wretchedness brought on, perhaps, by extreme poverty.[18] But its overtones are also usefully recalled: a reference to an object of little value (to others), or to the misfortunes that themselves produce a state of misery. Lastly, it suggests the quality of the person who themselves are in the state of misery—qualities of meanness or in its modern forms, of miserliness.[19] States of misery can be transitory, with respect to a particular state of being that may pass either because outside circumstances turn for the better or because the miserable person undertakes some sort of active measures to change the state of their condition. But it also suggests that a state of misery may be a stable one—one that reflects characteristics of approaches to the material world that rejects the operational baseline principles that drives the rest of the world. It suggests, in effect, an underlying set of moral judgments about materiality and the material aspirations of a society the development of which is directed toward some other moral good, and which tolerates no opposition to this vision by individuals or groups. As such, one speaks here to the political psychology of misery[20] and its normative expression and performance as sacrifice—by the State of its principles and by individuals of necessities for daily life. As a political psychology it blends the politics of locating the power to assess and meet “need” with the psychology of manufacturing desire or wants and then mediating between the two, issues deeply intertwined with concepts of development, consumption, and the management of the masses.[21]
Might it be possible to describe the current state of Cuba as an effort to perfect a stable state of misery? Is it possible to institutionalize a constant state of national sacrifice to maintain a stable state system based on the assumption of the constancy of sacrifice and guided by the mechanics for avoiding an intolerable state of misery?[22] 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?
These are questions that are worth asking. The stability of the Cuban state and its apparatus has confounded experts, political figures and others for decades. The certainty that the Cuban Marxist-Leninist State, heavily dependent on the Soviet Union would fall with the collapse of its principal patron never came to pass.[23] And yet that “special” period[24] appeared to have the opposite effect. It set into practice the conditions under which the state apparatus (and its ideological project) could not just survive, but thrive, in an environment of misery.[25] Indeed, one might be tempted to wonder whether, from the first, a dynamic state of misery was the price that had to be paid for the ideological purification of the state. It was to the navigation of that stability and misery that the apparatus eventually appeared to dedicate itself by drawing on the moral implications of the political-economic model, and by colluding with internal and external actors to supply it with just enough support to maintain just enough misery that would keep the population busy but would not effectively threaten the stability of the state. From the perspective of global economic principles and expectations, all this this goes against reason, that is the rationality of collective behaviors that are grounded in its own ideologies of welfare maximization. Applied to Cuba, as thirty years of analysis from the members of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy attests—over and over—Cuba ought not to have been able to survive in its current form.[26] And yet it has.[27]
This, of course, is just conjecture. Answers of the sort that academics are found of (as well as the political actors who consume academic “truth” as hard objects on which political choices can be sustained (or appear to be sustained)) are considerably more difficult to obtain with any degree of certainty. It may be possible to extract hints within the ideologies and practices of key actors. These may lead, eventually, to a better understanding of the condition of Cuba and the basis for its stability, even in the face of its state of misery, or perhaps precisely because of the willingness of its apparatus to maintain that state. It is to those ends, to the extraction and consideration of these hints in ideology and action, 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 [28] 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. Consumerism itself becomes an avatar for the system the operation of which would consume Cuba and leave it in an even worse state of penury.[29]
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: (1) states and other foreign lenders colluding with the maintenance of the state of misery; (2) the apparatus of the Cuban state itself and the elaboration of a dual character economy that fulfills the aspirations of the ideological element of the state; and (3) Cuba’s projection of itself, or at least its self-perception into the world, especially in the shadow of its quite useful relationship with the United States, especially in the form of the narrative projections of ALBA.
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.
The parts are woven together through a series of 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). This sets up the theoretical context, one grounded in a determination to engage in a robust inverted mimesis of the enemy. The second set of five vignettes consider how this theoretical context is manifested in the working experiences of the state and its consequences for the people—in more theoretical language it distills the phenomenology of this theoretic inverted mimesis. That is, they 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. This touches not just on the construction and operation of its apparatus, but also on the way in which Cuba’s friends and enemies collude to ensure the operational plausibility of a stable state of misery. The last four vignettes add the dialectical element to the system. A dialectical element, of course, is essential to the conceptualization of a Marxist-Leninist system (it must move forward and must move forward in a precisely defined direction).[30] Here the dialectical element is somewhat unique in a Marxist-Leninist framework—through the engagement with periodic mass explosions. 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) willingness of the state apparatus to widen or narrow the aperture of toleration of the non-state sector. That, in turn, is a function of the willingness of the state to ignore the unofficial sector. The four elements—apparatus, mass protest, non-state sector regulation, and toleration of the unofficial economy, then serve as the experiential reality of the operation of stability in misery.
The object is then quite straightforward: to begin to understand the cognitive basis for the stubborn resistance of the Cuban elites to the reforms that seem both inevitable and unavoidable by outsiders, especially among economists and political scientists and their disciples. The answer appears as straightforward: that starting from a quite different (and to non-Cuban specialists, absurd) set of core premises through which the world and their role in it is rationalized, these elites necessarily perceive what is rational to others as the supreme threat to political, moral, and social order. To preserve it they are quite willing to sustain a state of misery, at least until they can move forward (whatever that means). The irony, of course, is that the very elements that condemn the Cuban position as fundamentally and dangerously irrational, are also those who have facilitated its continued existence through programs of subsidies and stabilization programs.
[1] W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs, Pennsylvania State University,
239 Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA 16802 (1.814.863.3640 (direct)); lcb11ATpsu.edu. An earlier version of this paper was presented for the panel on Social and Cultural Consequences of Cuba’s Economic Path? At the 2024 Annual Conference of the Association for the study of the Cuban Economy (Miami, FL 19 October 20204). My thanks to the organizers as well as for the comments and suggestions received. Special thanks to my research assistant David Hincapié García-Herreros (LLM, Penn State expected 2025) for his superlative work on this essay.
[2] Fidel Castro Ruz, Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz en la concentración de los obreros de plantas eléctricas, el 11 de abril de 1959 [Speech delivered by the Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro Ruz at the Rally of Electrical Plant Workers 11 April 1959], available at [http://www.fidelcastro.cu/es/discursos/discurso-pronunciado-en-la-concentracion-de-los-obreros-de-plantas-electricas], (last visited Oct. 21, 2024) [“Our people will be greater the greater the obstacles they face; the more history will speak of our people the more difficulties they have to overcome; the more justice the future will do them the more they are slandered today, and all that can be said is that here a society was organized where all the peoples of the world could come to learn what justice was, what democracy was, and that it knew how to defend it and knew how to sustain it, and, although we do not know what fate has in store for us, we do have sufficient certainty to say that our Revolution will triumph because we will know how to defend it, or that our people will perish if it is necessary to perish to defend it (APPLAUSE).”].
[3] Norlys Perez, Cuba faces island-wide blackout after power plant failure, Ap News, Oct. 18–20, 2024, available at [https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/world/2024/10/18/cuba-suffers-blackout-after-power-plant-failure/75738911007/], (last visited Oct. 20, 2024).
[4] On January 14, 2025, President Biden removed Cuba from the list of State sponsors of terrorism. The letter of recission and the (Statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre are reproduced at Larry Catá Backer, “Taking Steps to Support the Cuban People”: Mr. Biden Removes Cuba From List of State Sponsors of Terrorism and Cuba Frees 553 Prisoners, Law At The End Of The Day (Jan. 14, 2025), available at [https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2025/01/taking-steps-to-support-cuban-people-mr.html], (last visited Jan. 25, 2025). On January 20, 2025, President Trump reversed the recission and placed Cuba, along with North Korea, Iran, and Syria. See, Trump reinstates Cuba as state sponsor of terrorism, reversing Biden's decision, CBS News (21 January 2025), available at [https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/trump-reinstates-cuba-as-state-sponsor-of-terrorism-reversing-bidens-decision/], (last visited Jan. 25, 2025).. The effects of designation carry significant economic sanctions: “the four main categories of sanctions resulting from designation under these authorities include restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.” U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism, State Sponsors of Terrorism, available at [https://www.state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism/], (last visited Jan. 25, 2025).
[5] Fidel Castro Ruz, Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz en la concentración de los obreros de plantas eléctricas, el 11 de abril de 1959, supra note 1 (“En dos palabras, que no soportaría el pueblo que le faltase la corriente eléctrica. Sería realmente insoportable eso de que le quitaran el refrigerador, el radio, el televisor, la luz eléctrica, el teléfono también y todo sería un desastre.”)
[6] Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, ‘Cuba Seguirá en Combate,’ Granma (Oct. 22, 2024); available [https://www.granma.cu/cuba/2024-10-22/cuba-seguira-en-combate-22-10-2024-01-10-57], (last visited Oct. 22, 2024) («Seguimos en combate, seguimos trabajando en la atención a estas dos importantes situaciones que ponen una condición excepcional en la vida de las cubanas y los cubanos; y estaremos permanentemente en contacto con nuestro pueblo en la misma medida en que vamos avanzando en la atención a estos problemas».).
[7] Martin Holbraad, Revolución o muerte: Self-Sacrifice and the Ontology of Cuban Revolution, 79(3) Ethnos: J. Anthropology 365, 365–87 (2013).
[8] Perhaps this is well captured in the writing of Che Guevara during the period of post-revolutionary military government in Cuba (1959-1976). Ernesto Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba, Letter from Major Ernesto Che Guevara to
Carlos Quijano, editor of the Montevideo weekly magazine Marcha (Mar. 1965), reprinted in MARXISTS.ORG, available at [https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism-alt.htm], (last visited Jan. 25, 2025).
The vanguard group is ideologically more advanced than the mass; the latter is acquainted with the new values, but insufficiently. While in the former a qualitative change takes place which permits them to make sacrifices as a function of their vanguard character, the latter see only the halves and must be subjected to incentives and pressure of some intensity; it is the dictatorship of the proletariat being exercised not only upon the defeated class but also individually upon the victorious class.
Ibid.
[9] The notion of sacrifice includes a transactional element—one gives something up in return for something else—as well as a sacral element, one performs a sacred rite to satisfy the gods or as an act of solidarity with a higher ideal. See, e.g., Sacrifice, Etymology Online, available [https://www.etymonline.com/word/sacrifice], (last visited Oct. 18, 2024).
[10] See, e.g., Simon Koschut, The Structure of Feeling – Emotion Culture and National Self-Sacrifice in World Politics, 45(2) Millennium 174 -192 (201).; generally, Amitai Etzioni, The Common Good (Polity Press, 2014); Marcus Raskin, The Common Good: Its Politics, Policies and Philosophy (Taylor & Francis, 2019).
[11] Jorge Pérez-López, Waiting For Godot: Cuba's Stalled Reforms and Continuing Economic Crisis, in CUBAN COMMUNISM 1959-2003 176, 176–97 (Irving Louis Horowitz & Jaime Suchlicki eds., Transaction Publishers 2003).
[12] Javier Corrales, The Gatekeeper State: Limited Economic Reforms and Regime Survival in Cuba, 1989-2002, 39(2) LATIN Am. Res. Rev. 35 (June 2004). Considered generally in Larry Catá Backer, Cuba's Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post Fidel Castro Era (Little Sir Press, 2018).
[13] For example, Archibald R.M. Ritter, The Cuban Economy in the Twenty-first Century Recuperation or Relapse?, in The Cuban Economy in the Twenty-first Century (Jorge Dominguez, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva & Lorena Barberia eds., David Rockefeller Ctr. for Latin Am. Studies, 2005); Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Can Cuba's Economic Reforms Succeed?, 8(4) AM. Q. 85 (Fall 2014); Ricardo Torres Pérez, Updating the Cuban Economy: The First 10 Years, 84(2) Soc. Res.: An Int'l Q. 255 (Summer 2017).
[14] Andres Oppenheimer, Castro's Final Hour: The Secret Story behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba (Simon & Schuster, 1993).
[15] Domínguez, Jorge. Why the Cuban Regime Has Not Fallen, in CUBAN COMMUNISM 1959-2003 (Irving Louis Horowitz & Jaime Suchlicki eds., Transaction Publishers, 2003).
[16] F.H. Bradley, The Limits of Individual and National Self-Sacrifice, 5(1) Int'l J. Ethics 17 (1894).; see generally, Paul Stern, Why do People Sacrifice for their Nations?, (Routledge, 1995).
[17] Misery, Etymology Online, available at [https://www.etymonline.com/word/misery], (last visited Sept. 20, 2024).
[18] Miseria, Cambridge Dictionary Online,available at [https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/spanish-english/miseria], (last visited Sept. 20, 2024).
[19] Ibid.
[20] In this sense it is to be distinguished from the more common understanding of misery—and its indexes—within the field of economics, especially as it ties in to notions of economic development. See, e.g., Jagmohan Singh, Does economic misery stifle human development? empirical evidence from Asian countries, 89 GeoJournal 116 (2024). (“The existing literature is primarily focused on exploring the linkages between economic misery and numerous other variables such as economic growth, income inequality, poverty, health spending, life satisfaction, human capital outflow, crime, institutional
quality, economic freedom, political stability, remittances, and international tourist departures” ibid., p. 3).
[21] One progresses from Marx’s commodity fetishism (Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Gateway Editions, Moscow, 1987)), to Freud (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Group Psychology and Other Works (James Strachey trans., Hogarth Press 1955); and Veblen (Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. (Cosimo Classics, New York, [1899] 2007)), to modern social sciences of consumer desire and Catholic social theory (e.g. Pope St. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, Encyclical Letter (May 1, 1991); available at [https://capp-usa.org/centesimus-annus/#36], (last visited Jan. 25, 2025) (“A given culture reveals its overall understanding of life through the choices it makes in production and consumption. It is here that the phenomenon of consumerism arises.”). This is to be distinguished from political consumerism, bound up in boycotts or support of products to advance a political objective. See, e.g., Lauren Copeland & Shelley Boulianne, Political consumerism: A meta-analysis, 43 Int’l Pol. Sci. Rev. 3, 3-18 (2022).
[22] Consider generally Peter Jonkers, Justifying Sacrifice, 50(3-4) Neue Z. für Syst. Theologie & Religionsphilosophie 284, 284–300 (2008).
[23] For a discussion of the nature of the Soviet Union's economic support of Cuba until the early 1990s, see, e.g., Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Cuban Economy in 1999-2001: Evaluation of Performance and Debate on the Future, in 11 Cuba in Transition 1, 4 (2001).
[24] The literature is extensive, Consider the essays in Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s (Ariana Hernandez-Reguant ed., Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009).
[25] Miguel Pina e Cunha & Rita Campos e Cunha, The role of mediatory myths in sustaining ideology: the case of Cuba
after the “special period”, 14(3) Culture & Org. 207, 207-223 (2008) (“(1) debates on business and society are
ideological in nature, and (2) ideology is often naturalized, therefore imposing theoretical lenses that narrow the debate on possible alternatives” Ibid., p. 208).
[26] See essays, Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, Annual Proceedings 1991-2023, available at [https://www.ascecuba.org/annual-proceedings], (last visited Oct. 1, 2024).
[27] For a taste, see, Cynthia Benzing, Cuba: Is the “Special Period” Really Over?, (2005) 11 Int’l Advances Econ. Rsch. 69, 69–82 (2005).
[28] Anne Meneley, Consumerism, 47 Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 117, 117–32 (2018). (“review contemporary anthropological work on consumerism in relation to five topics: (a) excess, (b) waste, (c) connectivity, (d )fair-ish trade, and (e) the semiotics of self-fashioning.” Ibid., 118)
[29] One gets a sense of this from the essays in Fidel Castro Ruz, On Imperialist Globalization (Zed Books, 2002); see also George Lambie, Globalization and the Cuban Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, (2019) 86 Eur. Rev. Latin Am. & Carib. Stud. 81, 81–95 (2019).
[30] Partido Comunista de Cuba, Conceptualización del Modelo Económico y Social Cubano de Desarrollo Socialista (June 2021); available at [https://www.mined.gob.cu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/CONCEPTUALIZACION-DEL-MODELO-ECONOMICO-Y-SOCIAL-CUBANO-DE-DESARROLLO-SOCIALISTA-y-LINEAMIENTOS-DE-LA-POLITICA-ECONOMICA-Y-SOCIAL-DEL-PARTIDO-Y-LA-REVOLUCION-PARA-EL-PERIODO-2021.pdf], (last visited Oct. 19, 2024). (hereafter Conceptualización).
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