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I am delighted to share a recently posted essay: Legal-Institutional Foundations for Reconstruction in a Post-Revolutionary Cuba: A Conceptual Exercise (March 2026), which will appear in the Cuba in Transition, 2025 Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban economy. It may be accessed HERE.
Here is the abstract:
Cuba is certainly in transition. But that means very different things to groups competing to drive transition. The resulting dissonance, guided by sometimes incompatible formative premises, complicates the challenge of transition, its forms, where that transition leads, and what may be necessary. Whatever the form and trajectories of transition, it is clear that transition will require substantial attention to the construction of aligned institutional-legal foundations. The purpose of these remarks is to consider the form and challenges of developing robust institutional-legal foundations in the Cuban context. It is organized in five parts. After the introduction the remarks first considers conceptual starting points-the importance of the development and choice of political-economic models as a predicate for the construction of robust institutional-legal foundations. It is divided into two parts, the first focusing on normative political orders, and the second examining institutional-legal orders. The remarks then considers two starting points of analysis. The first situates the Cuban political-economic model as a conceptual baseline. The second the current state of institutional-legal foundations in Cuba. The remarks then articulates the context in which the challenge of transition appears in contemporary Cuba-the end of the long arc of the Cuba revolutionary regime. That brings the remarks to the heart of the matter: what the future can bring. This is divided into several organizing-normative questions: (a) Who is to make decisions about transitioning?; (b) What ideological political economic model is to serve as the basis of post-revolutionary institutional-law building?; (c) Through which institutional actors ought this ideological politicaleconomic model be realized?; (d) What timeline is to be chosen to develop and implement this transition?; and (e) The Marie Kondo moment-what of the present system is to be kept and what is to be discarded or repurposed?
The Introduction follows below
Larry Catá Backer[1]
ABSTRACT: Cuba is certainly in transition. But that means very different things to groups competing to drive transition. The resulting dissonance, guided by sometimes incompatible formative premises, complicates the challenge of transition, its forms, where that transition leads, and what may be necessary. Whatever the form and trajectories of transition, it is clear that transition will require substantial attention to the construction of aligned institutional-legal foundations. The purpose of these remarks is to consider the form and challenges of developing robust institutional-legal foundations in the Cuban context. It is organized in five parts. After the introduction the remarks first considers conceptual starting points--the importance of the development and choice of political-economic models as a predicate for the construction of robust institutional-legal foundations. It is divided into two parts, the first focusing on normative political orders, and the second examining institutional-legal orders. The remarks then considers two starting points of analysis. The first situates the Cuban political-economic model as a conceptual baseline. The second the current state of institutional-legal foundations in Cuba. The remarks then articulates the context in which the challenge of transition appears in contemporary Cuba—the end of the long arc of the Cuba revolutionary regime. That brings the remarks to the heart of the matter: what the future can bring. This is divided into several organizing-normative questions: (a) Who is to make decisions about transitioning?; (b) What ideological political economic model is to serve as the basis of post-revolutionary institutional-law building?; (c) Through which institutional actors ought this ideological political-economic model be realized?; (d) What timeline is to be chosen to develop and implement this transition?; and (e) The Marie Kondo moment—what of the present system is to be kept and what is to be discarded or repurposed?
* * *
1. Introduction.
It is increasingly rare for students of the Cuban economy, and the general political-legal situation within Cuba (and among the various factions of its Diaspora[2]) to be challenged to approach issues of contemporary Cuba in interesting and possibly useful ways. Far too much scholarship and commentary is driven first by ideological goals and perspectives within which analysis is inserted in order to realize the assumptions and premises of the ideology that drives analysis.[3] Jorge Pérez López, however, has managed to do just that. He challenged some of us to consider the legal-institutional foundations for reconstruction in a post-revolutionary Cuba.[4] He has not constrained that analysis by any particular outcome of revolution that may be favored by one or another faction, but rather has provided a framework within which it may be possible to explore conceptual futures for Cuba and its transition, including the notion of transition itself.[5] Political scientists. Of course, focus on politics in the context of transition, yet a broader understanding of transition provides a more fertile ground for approaching the driving elements and the character of change in Cuba, one that is not tied to shopping for off-the-shelf political systems (e.g., liberal democracy or authoritarian or Marxist Leninist systems), but rather to consider that in the broader and more profound context of systemic reform within which political modeling plays only a part. In that sense when one considers transition, one might embrace more fully its general sense of changing or passing from one state of being or acting to another.[6]
That reframing of the task suggested both profundity and continuity—a continuity that people sometimes forgot in the acceptance of the a-historicism of the last Cuban revolution.[7] After all, people have been writing one thing or another about the construction and reconstruction of the legal-institutional foundations of a Cuban state in contemporary style since at least the 1860s.[8] And certainly one can argue that Cuban history is more the story of endless transition (with different amplitudes of course) than it is of periods of stability and organic development, one always undertaken in the shadow of some dominant state of other.[9] That academic-conceptual-political-economic talking, endless, sometimes repetitive, and always mimetic in the sense that it always seeks to reproduce in a contextually relevant way what may fit best within polycentric systems of global power into which Cuba must be situated if it is to survive, and perhaps thrive. Indigeneity of form and function, therefore, tends to serve as a mask beneath which much more interesting forces must be aligned. It is a mask that covers not just Cuban politics but also the construction of the ethno-racialism of the Cuban people.[10] What remains of all of these efforts is a mountain of text about the cultures and character of whatever institutional apparatus they might fancy tied to the ideology of whatever political legal ideology is strategically useful for operationalizing and controlling whatever vision they might wish to convince a critical number of others to embrace.[11] That is politics, and fair game. For those who view politics as the appropriate focus within which analysis may be instrumentalized that is good—and expected.[12]
Yet one wonders about the possibility of conceptualizing a normative operational legal-institutional framework that might be able, not to resist but to expose one’s own bias, and in that way moderate the inevitable impulse, especially in the case of Cuba studies, to speak to transition with knives and forks at the ready, and eager to feast on the body of the Cuban State and through that apparatus, on its people. That feast is not meant to destroy; it is meant to extract value without killing the host. That approach is perfectly fair, and certainly has been the modus operandi of human collectives and their individuated structures of power, for a very long time.[13] It was not avoided in the construction of post 1959 Revolutionary Cuba, and then a mimetic Soviet Leninist (not Marxist) state, now decaying--like the structures of La Habana Vieja—into three co-existing governance apparatus: the military state (which has survived and transformed itself from its 1959-76 origins), the apparatus of a Caribbean style Soviet[14] nomenklatura that emerged after 1976, and the structures and cultures, including institutional-legal cultures, of the informal economy, one that is at once both domestically targeted and transnational in scope and operation.
Transition, then, might be considered first from out of its conceptual foundations in a way that permits, to some extent, these starting points from becoming lost in its politics and strategic calculus.[15] These conceptual foundations exist beyond the strategic calculus who see in the possibility of transition only the objectification of their desires, which are in turn the manifestation of their belief systems from which it is possible to form desire in the first place. The foundational conception of transition, then, focuses on the way in which one identifies, signifies, orders, and values “things” (tangible and intangible physical and abstract objects) that become the objects, processes, rules, and institutions of a political economic order, now understood as a conceptual cage of premises and ways of viewing the world that shapes the preferred rationalization of the reality of social relations.[16] That conceptual cage then shapes transition, now better understood as the space (platform in modern conceptions of the location of human action) where law, ideology, institutions, and value analytics themselves are objects with their own value and for which there are markets. Transition, then, in human economic-political spaces are themselves objects for which there are markets of desire. To speak of transition then is to speak to the mechanics of transactions in cognitive cages within which social relations may be realized through the application of the premises and tastes for collective organization that each represents.
And that is the fundamental story of, and the challenge for, Cuba—the land of permanent transition. Cuba is among the most vitally important laboratories of this contemporary performance of transition in its political, normative, strategic, utilitarian and legal sense. With as a critically important Cuba object of study, one might be intrigued about the possibilities of the way on which one might identify, signify, order, and value “things” that become, in turn, the objects, processes, rules and institutions of a political-economic order—and especially how that shapes transition, where law, ideology, institutions, and value analytics themselves become objects in transition. All of this transition becomes more interesting still where all of these objects and significations acquire a value, in relation to the political-economic model that serves as the baseline for measurement, and for which there are markets.
It is only within these contextual borders that it may be useful to consider the possibilities of foundations, the consideration of which would be triggered by some sort of post-revolutionary state, of institutional and legal structures on which another apparatus of governance, for both institutions and individuals, might be conceived. That is, how can one approach this specific instance of transition within Cuba’s two centuries of constant transition by focusing on the construction and instrumentalization of institutional-legal foundations toward the ideological ends that drives the current efforts at transition.
It is to this task in the context of Cuban transitions that the rest of this essay is addressed. his is my task. And with this task a caution most ironically culled from the mouth of a barber pretending to be a prince send to the house of a minor noble with two daughters and a stepdaughter who is consigned to the cinders of the kitchen fireplace in order to discover a wife for his prince dressed as his servant: ¿Pero qué tragedia debe surgir aquí al final de nuestra comedia? (“But what tragedy must arise here at the end of our comedy?”).[17] The history of Cuba in respect of the constitution of institutional legal foundations guided by the flavor of the month ideological conceptual cage that tickles the fancy of those with the power to make it happen may be summed up since the middle of the 19th century as an accumulation of an endless production of comedy producing its own version of tragedy in generationally contextual ways. But if it to the start of a new cycle of comedy that the trajectories of the current Cuban situation points, then it may be worth writing its script, if only to ameliorate the tragedy that comes at its end.
To those ends, the essay starts with the foundations of any discussion of institutional legal foundations. From this it is possible to briefly situate the discussion from out of the current, and now deeply naturalized, language, habits, and behavior expectations of Cuba’s current form of Caribbean Marxist-Leninism. From there one can consider the current state of institutions and law within that system. It is on that basis that one can start to play with what comes after. One can then consider turning points—what sort of post-revolution will produce what sort of political-ideological foundation on which it will be possible to build am institutional-legal foundation that both manifest that ideology and produces the baseline from which stability and ideologically constructed goals can be fulfilled. That turning point analysis then serves as a reasonable conceptual basis from out of which it may be possible to rationalize an institutional-legal foundation for Cuba—any system really. It doesn’t matter, except to shape the task of naturalizing its “rightness” with the masses, which is also a function of the ability of the apparatus to deliver. I end these remarks with a brief consideration of the range of institutional-legal foundations may follow.
To leave no room for surprises, the essay suggests the following end point for any exercise of institution-law foundation building: Institutional legal foundations do not build the necessary solidarity of a collectively embraced political-economic normative order. But institutional-legal forms that draw on and elaborate current expectations and provide pathways toward development driven by indigenous elements offer some promise for a more stable and prosperous future. None of this necessarily requires revolution; nonetheless transition may over time move a political collective substantially along any path toward development that they might choose.
[1] W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs, Pennsylvania State University. Originally presented as remarks prepared for delivery at the 2025 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, Miami, Florida, 25 October 2025 (extended and lightly annotated from the text as delivered). Great thanks to my research assistant Daniil Rose (BS, MIA Penn State expected 2027).
[2] See, generally, Uva de Aragón, Jorge Domínguez, Jorge Duany, Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Orlando Márquez, and Juan Antonio Blanco, Report: The Cuban Diaspora in the 21st Century, Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University (July 2011), available [https://cri.fiu.edu/_assets/docs/the-cuban-diaspora-in-the-21st-century.pdf]
[3] See, e.g., Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline, 13(2) Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs 1-84 (2025).
[4] See the essays in Scott Morgenstern, Jorge Pérez-López, and Jerome Branche (eds.), Paths for Cuba: Reforming Communism in a Comparative Perspective (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
[5] Consider Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, A Theory of Political Transitions, 91(4) The American Economic Review 938-963 (2001) (transitions from and to liberal democratic models).
[6] The term in English derives from the Latin “transire” “to go or cross over.” Etymology Online, Transition, available [https://www.etymonline.com/word/transition].
[7] For my critique, see Larry Catá Backer, Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post Fidel Castro Era (Little Sir Press, 2018).
[8] For an interesting perspective Juan Antonio Blanco, The Political Transformation of the Cuban Regime, Seen Through the Perspective of Conflict Resolution, Working Paper Real Instituto Elcano No. 32/2008 (June 26, 2008), available [https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/work-document/the-political-transformation-of-the-cuban-regime-seen-through-the-perspective-of-conflict-resolution-wp/]
[9] Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History (NY: Scribner, 2021).
[10] Discussed in Larry Catá Backer, “From Hatuey to Che: Indigenous Cuba without Indians and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” (2008) 33(1) American Indian Law Review 201-238.
[11] Cf., George J. Borjas, and Nate Breznau, Ideological bias in the production of research findings, 12(1) Science Advances (1 January 2026), available [https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adz7173DOI] (“As the production of research findings does not take place in an observed experimental setting, it is difficult to isolate the potential role of ideological bias. The problem is further confounded because ideological bias can enter the research process in many ways at different stages, including the framing of the hypothesis and the design of the research methodology.”).
[12] Excellent examples of the type and style, see, e.g., Carlos Pérez, Post-Castro, No Reform: Crafting a U.S. Strategy to Advance Cuban Freedom, Yale Journal of International Studies (21 Aug. 2025), available [https://yris.yira.org/column/post-castro-no-reform-crafting-a-u-s-strategy-to-advance-cuban-freedom/];
[13] In its current form, there are those who would organize these impulses in one of a variety of forms of “transitional justice.” See, e.g., United Nations, Transitional Justice: A Strategic Tool for People, Prevention, and Peace (Guidance Note of the Secretary-General) (July 2023), available [https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/transitionaljustice/sg-guidance-note/2023_07_guidance_note_transitional_justice_en.pdf]; see also United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, UNRIC Library Backgrounder: Transitional Justice (9 January 2025), available [https://e4k4c4x9.delivery.rocketcdn.me/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2019/09/transitionaljustice.pdf] (“Since 2004, the United Nations has defined transitional justice as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”).
[14] On Soviet Marxist-Leninism, see Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (P.S. Falla (trans), MY: Norton, 2005).
[15] Cf., James Manzi, The Ideological Orientation of Academic Social Science Research 1960-2024, 55 Theory and Society 25 (2026), available [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-026-09690-2] (“ In sum, prior work has established that U.S. social science faculties have tended to be ideologically left-leaning for many decades and that this orientation could plausibly affect their research output.”).
[16] For one version of its theorization see Andrew Stables, Semiotics and Transitionalist Oragmatism, 53(4) Journal of the Philosophy of Education 773-787 (2019).
[17] Jacopo Ferretti, La Cenerentola (music by Gioachino Rossini; 25 January 1817, Rome), )Scena sesta (Dandini), available http://www.librettidopera.it/zpdf/cenere.pdf (“Ma al finir della nostra commedia, che tragedia qui nascer dovrà!”)
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