Cooperatives in Cuba

This book is a broad and rich collection of contributions to the debate on cooperatives in Cuba and argues that they have the potential to both improve Cubans’ material standard of living and to strengthen the Revolution’s project of building socialism.For almost 200 years advocates of socialism have argued about whether having cooperatives as base production units is inconsistent with socialism’s requirements for a socially and democratically planned economy. Some advocates of cooperatives have argued that cooperatives operating in a socialist system would lose the autonomy that they consider them to have in a capitalist system. Other advocates of cooperatives argue to the contrary that, freed from many of the economic and political restrictions capitalism imposes on all its productive units, cooperatives in a socialist system would in fact have greater autonomy to pursue the cooperative goals that they aspire to. Concerning what is possible, the contributors argue that organizing large parts of Cuba’s existing and necessary small and medium scale production into cooperatives would be beneficial both for improving Cubans’ material standard of living and for strengthening the Revolution’s project of building a socialist economy. Concerning the cooperatives that exist in Cuba today, the contributors argue two factors constitute key barriers to the cooperatives’ ability to achieve these goals. First, their performance is severely crippled by the unnecessary and inappropriate seriously inadequate autonomy from state institutions of their economic management within the national economic plan. Second, cooperatives need to be massively developed and promoted not only in the agricultural sector where they already play such an important role, but also in the much larger nonagricultural sector of the economy, where an official program to do exactly that has been “on pause” for over a decade. Cooperatives in Cuba is a call for the Cuban government to promote an authentic cooperativization of significant parts of the small and medium productive units that are explosively developing there, as a part of its new socioeconomic model for its desired “prosperous and sustainable socialism.”