Upstream - Cuba Pt. 7: How Cuban Socialism Works w/ Helen Yaffe

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

In this episode, part 7 of our ongoing series on Cuba, we're joined by Helen Yaffe for a conversation exploring what the attempts to build socialism in Cuba look like in a practical sense—from housing to food distribution to economic management. Helen Yaffe is a professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, and Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution. She is also the cohost of the Cuba Analysis podcast and the documentary  Cuba's Life Task: combating climate change. The episode begins by bringing back the lens and exploring what we mean when we talk about socialism and communism and transitional states, inserting the centrality of development and underdevelopment into the conversation of building socialism and situating Cuba into this framework. We break down the main components of Cuban socialism which including central planning, the decentralization of feedback mechanisms (deep democracy), the commitment to social welfare with a particular emphasis on medical advancements and technology, science, etc. We then break down how these components existed within the different stages of Cuba's attempts to lay the foundations for socialism, focusing on the different experiments with their economic management system from the 1960s to the early 1990s as Cuba pulled towards and then away from the Soviet economic management model and what this meant.  We then explore the concept of motivation and salaries and how this works under socialism without profit incentives or wage incentives or other material incentives, exploring how Cuba navigated these issues by focusing specifically on its salary system. We go on to discuss the complexities of how housing and food distribution is arranged under Cuba's socialist system and the challenges that Cuba faced during the period leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is where we will pick up the conversation with Helen next week in our Patreon episode exploring Cuba's "Special Period." Further resources: We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx 1875 The Power Of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006) Cuban Bees: The Organic Revolution Related episodes: Listen to our ongoing series on Cuba The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism w/ Torkil Lauesen Intermission music: "Baila con mi Rumba" by Roberto Carcassés Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

One of the criticisms thrown about Cuba, oh, look at the, you know, the salaries are so low. Doctors get $20 a month, right? And that's true. But what is the function of a salary is to allow the recipient, the worker, to access the things that they need to, in very crude terms is like to reproduce yourself, right? To survive, to subsist, to come back and work for another day under capitalism. But in Cuba, a salary, doesn't have the same requirement because so much of what is in that basket of needs is provided free or heavily subsidised by the state. Some economists have done this sort of exercise where you give an economic value to the goods or the services which Cubans receive by the government give an economic value. When you add that to the salaries, actually the Cubans end up being among the higher as soon as in Latin America.

You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan.

There's a lot we hear about how socialism works, both from the right, which of course includes liberalism, and also from the left, both of which are not based in reality. So putting aside the demonizations from the right and the utopian fantasies of the Western left, what is socialism like in practice? What does it look like? Well, that's a question that we can only really begin to answer,

as socialism has not really yet been achieved, but it's also a question that varies depending on where you look. In this episode, part seven of our ongoing series on Cuba, we're joined again by Helen Yaffe for a conversation exploring what the attempts to build socialism in Cuba look like and have looked like historically, in a practical sense, from housing to food distribution to economic management and much more. Helen Yaffe is a professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow. She's the author of We Are Cuba, how a revolutionary people have survived in a post-Sovia world, and Che Guevara, the economics of revolution, which we

talked about last time we had Helen on the show. She's also the co-host of the Cuba Analysis podcast and the documentary Cuba's Life Task, Combating Climate Change. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes,

and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Della, in conversation with Helen Yaffe. Welcome back to Upstream, so good to have you back. As you know, we start with our guests introducing themselves. So can you share about yourself for our listeners? Well, first of all, thanks for having me back to Upstream Podcast. I'm Professor Helen Yaffi. Professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow.

And I specialize in mainly Cuban development, but also a bit of Latin America. And since I was a teenager, I have spent time living in and researching in visiting Cuba. So I first went in 1995, which was the middle of the special period, so-called, because of the special economic crisis, following the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Eastern European socialist countries and the USSR, and Cuba entered a very deep, very severe economic crisis for reasons which I think we'll talk about. So that was my first experience of actually existing socialism was to go to the outlier, Cuba, the Caribbean socialist island, in the midst of its worst economic crisis at that time. And so we started with on the series with before the revolution and then we had an episode on the

revolution. And then we had you come and we focused on Che but also around those immediate years following the revolution and the kind of immediate implementation and plans there. What I'd love to focus on for today is helping us understand what does socialism look like in practice? What is this attempt of socialism in the Cuban context? What can we learn from it? And also, what can it tell us for what's happening in Cuba today? How is it set it up for perhaps being more resilient or adaptive, but also in terms of what it may need to shift or change to continue to survive and keep the revolution going? So that's kind of our focus of today. And what I'd love to start with is terms. So, and I also think it's helpful to distinguish the terms. So my understanding is

that Cuba is a socialist state led by a communist party. So it's not necessarily communist yet, but it's in that transition too. And I'm even thinking about Torka Laosan, one of our recent guests, he even said the socialist states that exist are, they're even transitional states in themselves, because they are also transitioning from capitalism and also laying the foundation for socialism globally. And so they're in that messy transition phase themselves, even within socialism. And also to clarify, too, that communism is the classless, stateless, moneyless society under collective ownership, using that as its definition. And then the socialism is this bridge, is this pathway, this transition towards that. So just to begin there, is that your understanding? And how else would you describe kind of this liminal phase or this transitional phase that Cuba has been in?

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, there's so many inroads to that conversation, which is kind of fundamental and also complex. So, yeah, I mean, of course Cuba can't be a communist country while it's in a capitalist world and it faces imperialist attack. cause capitalism and imperialism are class systems. So you have the existence of class contradictions. And, you know, it would be impossible for any country to suddenly get rid of class distinctions. And while imperialism is seeking sectors of the society to represent its interests and so on. So class war continues. But what happens is that you have the idea is you have the working class in power through the socialist state. I mean, the other really key thing

and an aspect of my work, because I'm studying socialism in an obviously underdeveloped country, underdeveloped by hundreds of years of colonialism and Spanish colonialism and then US imperialism. And that is the question of scarcity comes into play, right? So communism implies, you know, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

In other words, everyone works as much as they're able to. Why, out of consciousness? You know, they want to contribute to the society and collective, and they receive everything they need. So that implies a state of material abundance, which you sort of associate with, you know, after capitalist development and technology, that we can produce enough for everyone to meet everyone's needs.

But of course, we've only ever seen socialist revolutions and socialist societies. in countries where underdevelopment comes into play. It's been the dual struggle, I should say, of the struggle against underdevelopment to revolutionise the productive forces, to raise the technological level in order to raise productivity,

to not have to ration goods through some sort of mechanism, which if you look at, you know, Marx talking about his critique of the Götter programme, he talks about that contradiction, where you can have, you know, the means of production can be socialist. So they've been socialised. They've been taken over and handed over to society.

But at the same time, you have what he calls bourgeois right, which is that distribution is still based on some concept of you receive according to the work that you've done, right? You're compensated according to your labour. And, you know, that's because the society hasn't reached that state of abundance. Now, this becomes really important in sort of Cuban. revolutionary theory, and particularly from the perspective of Che Guehara, who actually writes in his critical notes of the Soviet manual of political economy, he says, you know, these countries,

the Soviet Union, he quotes them, from the manual, they say, we're at socialism, we're arriving at communism. And, you know, he points out many reasons that that's not possible. But he says, you know, actually they've skipped a level stage, and that stage is the transition. to socialism. And I mean, I often hear from people. Oh, Che thought it was possible to skip socialism and jump to communism. But in all my many years of closely reading all the material from Che Guevara, I never saw that.

I never saw that notion. He did believe that you could skip through stages of development. He called it Kemandoetapas or burning through stages. And that was one of the reasons he was. keen on taking the most advanced technology, right? We don't have to go through a slow process of developing the mechanics industry, mechanical industry. We can import the latest technologies and so on. But this is really key, right? And I think this helps to explain why a lot of Western Marxists really grapple with the realities of socialist countries and end up taking a position where, you know,

they're never quite good enough because they don't understand their central perspective of this struggle against underdevelopment. But that has been for Cuba so important. And when we talk about underdevelopment, it's not just something that happens by policy mistakes or in a vacuum. It is being, it's a practical active process, right, that these countries are underdeveloped, their development is stunted by, colonialism and imperialism. And, you know, this is so important because when you look at like Marx and Engels, you know, the Communist Manifesto, they see the revolutionary potential of socialist communism, I should say, and the seeds of it are sown within capitalism and the contradictions and it will sort of almost organically shift, right? The workers will, you know,

the concentration of production is there, you create a proletariat and all they have to do is just, you know, sort of stand up and take over the means of production. But actually, as the years go by after the Communist Manifesto, and already for Marx when he's writing capital, right, he's looking at this process, what happens when capital goes overseas? And then, of course, there's the famous, well, they should be famous. You know, more and more researchers are picking up on these observations made by Marx and Engels of the impact or the effect of British capital exported overseas.

So they look at Ireland, Britain's oldest colony, and India, Britain's largest colony. And they talk about how British capital, i.e., this is nascent imperialism, although they don't use the word, has locked these countries into underdevelopment. And for example, every time the textile industry in India, you know, gets ahead or excels,

they go in and destroy it. call it a case of English vandalism. And, you know, in Ireland, how the peasantry was cleared off the land and left to be destitute. So this is, it's not just something that happens organically. It is a, you know, it's the flip side of imperialist or capitalist development and imperialism. So I think that's, I don't want to go back to the previous podcast we did on Chey's analysis and so on. But I think that understanding the battle, the struggle against underdevelopment, an integral part of the struggle to transition to socialism in the countries where we've seen it is absolutely key. And another thing relating this back to Cuba, this is also an element of how we

can understand the relationship in Cuba, or the bridge between the struggle for independence and the post-59 struggle for socialism. So, you know, the national hero of independence in Cuba is Jose Mardi, known as the apostle, and he helped to launch the first. He helped to launch the The third War of Independence against the Spanish at the late 19th century. And central to his thought was absolute commitment to sovereignty, yes, but also social justice. So he never had a vision where he wanted to just have Cuba for the Cuban elite and continue slavery and not address the poverty. He saw those things, the poverty and equality, racism, the slavery system, as products

of Cuba's colonisation, which they were, obviously. But this commitment to sovereignty and social justice is like the bridge that links Jose Marti to the revolutionary movement in the 1950s and then to the decision after 1959 or the measures that were taken to adopt a socialist country and the subsequent socialist system. And if you look even now, while Cuba is facing this really aggressive threat of genocide using starvation as a weapon and the oil siege and the threat of military attack. What is it that the Cubans are saying, which the outside Cuba is described as defiance? Actually, it's just an assertion of those two fundamental principles.

It's assertion of sovereignty and the commitment to social justice. So I hope that's addressed the themes I'm kind of gone a bit round them, but I think that's important. Yeah, and one reframe that I've loved is whenever we hear underdevelopment, we also can hear over-exploited, or really just exploited, but, you know, that process of underdevelopment, as you're saying, is an ongoing process. I love what you said about British vandalism, right? Like, it's an ongoing attempt at sabotage, and, in this case, for Cuba counter-revolution. And I'm also hearing, as we introduce Cuban socialism, yeah, to recognize one, where Cuba started the process, right, in 1959, which we've covered,

but just the high levels of inequality, the newest ownership of a lot of the land and finance tools and all that. Then there was the capital flight, right? The theft after Batista left Cuba. So where it started. And then there is the ongoing process of underdevelopment over exploitation, right, U.S. imperialism, U.S. threat, counter-revolution. And then another, which I'm sure we'll get to, is who can the country be in economic relationship with, right? Like trade relations and the idea of it being a close partner with the Soviet Union until it couldn't, right?

So that's another complexity is when you have. a socialist country in a sea of capitalist countries, how does it meet its needs, imports, and exports, depending on who their trade partners are? So thank you for all of that kind of contextualization of Cuban socialism and how you describe it. So tell us about, you know, how would you qualify or introduce socialism as an economic system in general? What are the characteristics or qualities that we have to note and pay attention to? So the idea. So the idea of socialism is that the state has taken control of the resources and, you know, production and distribution, but in the interest and representing the working class, right? So,

key features of that are, of course, nationalisation, but then there is the question of how you go from nationalisation, which is, you know, national control, to socialisation, which means that you've put society or the working class in control of the means of production, how do you create a situation where they are involved in and managing decisions about production, distribution and consumption and so on? And then, of course, another key element is planning. Planning is, you know, as Che Guevara said, he sees the law of value in planning is two opposites, right? That was an important statement at the time because the Soviets were saying, well, we can build socialism, we can have a planned economy, but we can use the law of value.

That is capitalist mechanisms within the plan. And Che Guevara was more dubious about that. And, you know, I think that there's a lot of merit to his arguments to say that if they were a kind of characteristic of socialism, it would be planning. Planning allows you to politically control decisions about production and distribution and consumption based, and when I say politically, it's based on the interests of society. So you can direct those things. It's not being directed by market mechanisms, by profit-seeking individuals. You can take decisions, again, going back to that key theme of social justice, you can say, what do our vulnerable populations need, how are we going to meet that need with domestic production or with imports?

And so it's all those decisions about what should be the balance between investment and saving imports and domestic production between the different sectors and the social welfare that they need. How do we fund all this? What's the balance between individual responsibility and collective responsibility? So those are really big questions that are social. this country has to answer. And then within that, you highlighted in your introduction is the question of money, but the question of money is actually really a question of how do we, you know, money is a function of the productive system and the social relations, right? The question, what's the role of money? It's to help us, you know, exchange goods. So how are we going to do that?

How are we going to decide what each individual receives? Is it in compensation for labour? Is it according to their need and so on and so forth. So in this sense, real socialism needs democracy because that is the only way that you can have the working class really in control and the collectivisation of production and management so that you're not just replacing a capitalist boss and management system with someone who calls themselves of socialism. And that's been one of the biggest battles as well

constantly finding new mechanisms, new forums, new platforms and practices to ensure that the Cuban population is engaged, is participating, is increasingly taking control. And it's very, very interesting to look at this broader history of the Cuban Revolution, but it's quite distinct that every time they've had a period of crisis, rather than resorting to repression and clampdowns, one of their package of solutions has been to deepen democracy, engagement and participation. And it has undoubtedly helped the Cuban Revolution to survive.

So they've been going through right now since 2011, a new economic management system under Raul Castro, a set of economic reforms, first called the, Guidelines for updating the social and economic system, and this was put out to national consultation. This is a good example of that level of participation. Everyone in Cuba was given access to these documents that were the results of years of work

between different specialists, academics, policy makers, people from different sectors. And then these guidelines were put out for public consult. months and months of consultation. Everyone was invited to attend meetings where they could comment, criticize, make suggestions, all recorded anonymously. People could participate in their neighbourhood meeting on their street. They could participate in their work group. They could participate in one of the mass organisations they remember.

So multiple times. And they recorded this process. And it was something like 1.3 million concrete proposals were made. They were all analysed and synthesized and categorized. And this incredible speech by Raul Castro said exactly how many were rejected because they implied a rejection of the socialist system. It was a tiny, tiny proportion. And most of them were complaining at that point about the dual currency or, you know, I don't know, the cost of food, low salaries and so on. And as a consequence of that process of consultation, 68%.

of those guidelines were changed and then it was put out again for more discussion. And so, you know, we see that kind of decentralising of decision making. And that's been so important in this period while the veteran revolutionaries, you know, were coming to the end of their mandates, the end of their lives. And it was very important in the context of new reforms that were being introduced for them to gain legitimacy with the population. so that they would accept them, you know, in the absence of the veteran leaders. So also really important and probably best known about Cuban socialism is, of course, its sort of social welfare system.

So that means, you know, it's investments in healthcare and education. We can also say culture, art and sport, which people are less well aware of. But these are considered human rights in Cuba and constitution. rights. And really, if you look at the statistics like the proportion of its GDP that Cuba spends on healthcare and education, it's very high indeed. It shows the importance that it's being given. And you can track that back to, you know, Fidel Castro's speech and then history will absolve me speech after the court case, after the Moncada Barracks, where he talks about this misery of Cuban workers and people who don't have homes, who don't have education.

who don't have health care. So the commitment to the Moncada program meant that these investments had to be made. Of course, it was extremely difficult in the beginning because how are you going to do that process? How are you going to build medical clinics in rural places that don't even have a road when Batista and his cronies have left the country,

they've taken all the money. So it was a huge commitment from the Cuban government. And one aspect of that has been, And this is very much part of Fidel Castro's vision, right? The importance of investment, not just in health and education, but going further in science and technology for social development. So very early on, I mean, 1960 Fidel Castro stands up at the Academy of Sciences, you know, in a scenario where what two thirds of the Cuban population are undereducated or not educate, I mean, have low literacy or no literacy. And he says, you know, the future of Cuba will be a future of people of science, which must have seen like a total pipe dream.

And yet by the 1980s, they already have a ratio of scientists per population that's almost the same as the advanced capitalist country. So they do this process very quickly. And so much of the post-190, 1990, post-Soviet era developments that took place, I wrote about in my book, which have been so important for Cuba's survival, the seeds of that was sown with this commitment to education and simultaneously science and healthcare and all of these measures. Beautiful. So yeah, I'm hearing some of the qualities or attributes to Cuban socialism have been the central planning, the decentralization of feedback mechanisms,

or we can call it deep democracy. And then this last last, piece, the commitment to social welfare and particular emphasis on medical advancements and technology, science, et cetera. So that's great to give us that introduction to Cuban socialism. Now, you mentioned that there have been kind of phases of Cuban socialism, these different, we could call them waves. And in Cuban history, they do have these different names to them. So just briefly, could you bring us into what have been the stages of planning that have happened throughout Cuba's history and just a little bit about the qualities that define them? Okay, so there's two different things, right? Because one is the planning system and the other

is the economic management system. So you can have a plan that's devised with the workers or with ministries or however, but then the questions of, you know, the relationship between when factories pass goods from one to the other or from the fields of the factory, is that a commercial relationship, is that not? What are the mechanisms for getting people to work harder? Is it material incentives or not?

So those are sorts of questions of economic management. And there have been five different economic management systems in Cuba just within the first three decades, so just until the collapse of the Soviet bloc. So the 1960s is the period of transition of our experimentation. There's two different economic management systems functioning, developed simultaneously in different ministries in Cuba. One is the Soviet system or a Cuban adaptation of that Soviet planning and management system,

and the other is Che Guevara's alternative challenge to the Soviet system, which I talked about in the previous podcast. Then these are bought together in a badly conceived attempt to unify those systems and to actually, in a way, Zvado Dortikos, who was the person who led this attempt to establish a registry system, believed it was Che Guevara's system, but he didn't understand the system sufficiently. So he got rid of some key elements of control, inventory controls, accounting and so on. So you had this registry system introduced in 1968, which, you know, led to, it was very much motivated by idealism, the idea that, you know, you didn't need to keep accounts and everyone

would just work voluntarily and all sorts of stuff. And it coincided with the 1970s, Saffra, which involved the mobilisation of millions or hundreds of thousands of Cubans to leave their workplaces, to go and work in the fields to try and meet this. goal of 10 million ton harvest. This fails. There's pretty much some kind of chaos in the economy, and that's when the decision is taken, right? We're just going to have to go the tried and tested way and adopt the Soviet economic management and planning system. So Cuba increasingly adopts that system, while it increasingly integrates into the Council of Mutual economic assistance. It's already integrated to a large extent because its main trade, an investment is with

those countries, and they operate on annual plans or five-year plans, and Cuba's had to fit in with those plans. But it doesn't become a formal member until, I think it's 1976. So they then adopt the Soviet system, and they actually don't have it for very long before Fidel Castro. is making public speeches criticizing and manifestations that are happening, which he regards as a consequence of this system. So manifestations of corruption, of production based on meeting quotas

rather than social needs and not the social function, people just focused on getting material bonuses, so getting higher salaries and increasing their salaries by meeting targets, even if the production is not useful and that sort of thing. So by 1982, you can see in some speeches he's criticising these elements and also the separation between the party and the population,

the kind of bureaucracy he starts to see develop, which he's very aware is a big problem in the Soviet Union. It's kind of disengaged with the rest of the population. And then in some ways it's really interesting. has to go around kind of creating a consensus that these are problems and that what Cuba should do about it. So by 1986, he's won the argument and Cuba announces something called rectification of errors and negative tendencies, just known as rectification, which means a pulling away from the Soviet system and dropping the Soviet economic planning and management system and then going

back to finding their own sort of organic economic management system. So that's happening from 1986. Of course, the whole process is interrupted by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. So rectification can't objectively be judged because, you know, it hardly has time to be established. But I've argued that to understand why Cuba managed to survive the collapse of the socialist countries, it is very important to note what happened with rectification and the way that Cuba pulled itself away from the Soviet Union and worked hard to diversify its trade partners, worked to diversify the sectors of its economy. So they started investing in biotechnology against the advice of the Soviets and they started to invest in computer sciences with less success, but again,

against the advice of the Soviets and to also build up a reserve. And then Fidel Castro comes out in July 1989. So this is 16 months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he warns that the Soviet Union could collapse. And this is a really monumental declaration by Fidel, which, you know, the Cubans that I interview said, This came out of the blue like a bolt of lightning. And he says, you know, if one day and we hope it would never happen,

the Soviet Union were to collapse, Cuba would continue as a socialist country. We would continue fighting and resisting. And that kind of lays the foundation, and it shows that the Cubans were aware. Fidel Castro had also made speeches, particularly a speech on the 30th anniversary of Che Guevara's death during rectification 1987,

where he talks about Che Guevara's criticisms and warnings about the impact of the Soviet system of economic management. And he talks about some of the problems that have emerged. So construction workers are just doing these projects and just building the base of the building or the towers because they meet their targets and they get more bonuses, but they're not finishing buildings and how long is it taking to build a nursery in Havana

and all the rest of it. And he talks about these problems. He said, if Che had seen, you know, he warned us and we didn't listen. If only we'd listen to Chei, and then he urges Cubans, go back and read Che Guevara. And he urges, you know, he says Latin Americans and then people in the West should read Jay and everyone should read Che. So it's a really kind of monumental speech. Fidel Castro spoke all the time.

There literally so many of his speeches, but there are some key watershed speeches of Fidel, which mark a moment and mark a sort of a new moment for the Cuban revolution and kind of prepares people for changes that are ahead, and that's definitely one of them. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Helen Yaffe. We'll be right back. Thank you for a plan, forget your problem,

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by Roberto Carcassus. Now back to our conversation with Helen Yaffi. Thank you for that overview. and also, yeah, leading us up into the special period, which we will go into in our next conversation. I want to pull on a thread that you've brought up a few times around motivation, right?

And this question is, in a socialist economy, what is the motivation for working, right? And we have the kind of ideal motivation is for the collective good, right? And to do the work that needs to be done and to have the, the satisfaction. faction and to know that you're contributing to collective good. Where do bonuses come in? Where does material incentive and income? Where does that come in? So I know there's been an interesting history and Che has had particularly a lot of input on this topic. So tell us a little bit about what can we learn about motivation for labor in terms of socialism in Cuba. So, I mean, this is a complex problem, right? So under socialism, you want to raise productivity and productive capacity because you can never progress to communism without that material abundance. You want to do better at meeting people's needs. And so you need to use some of these same categories where you're looking at, you know, do you call it profit or do you call it a surplus? And when you produce more and you need to. And you need to use some of these same categories where you're looking at, you know, do you call it profit or do you call it a surplus? And when you need to use. And you need,

extra to repair your machinery, maintenance, and you also need to invest in expanding your production. And these are complex questions. How do you set prices? If you set prices according to domestic productivity, but goods from outside come from countries with higher productivity, they're always going to be cheaper. So why would anyone buy your domestic goods? So do you block import? So very complicated problems. And linked to that is the question of motivation, and salaries and incentives. And so very early on in the 1960s, I think it was finalized in 64,

Che Guevara was involved in this process of creating a new salary scale. And they said, we discovered there were like 90,000 different salary scales, and now we've brought them all together, and now we have eight different categories, and each one has four different scales. and in order to move from one to the other,

you need to increase your qualification, right? So they built in an incentive, which was an incentive to improve yourself because they had this whole thing about you improve yourself, then you improve your contribution, you increase your contribution to social development. So it's associating like self-improvement with social improvement. And that's the only way to go up into a new pay scale.

At the same time, they had to honour historic pay scales. So for a while, it was very messy because you'd get your salary at your rate and then you'd get your historic rate if you used to be paid more, although the poorest workers were actually paid more under the new system and so on. So for most of the period that we're talking about, salaries, I mean, just to be clear, in terms of an incentive, people are still working for a salary, right? And that's that contradiction that we talked about under socialism, where you

you can have national or social control of the means of production, but the way it's distributed is still people are remunerated according to their labour. So, you know, that's going to continue until there's more abundance, but also until people's consciousness changes, and they are happy to work for the collective good. And that's, you know, the real focus that Che Guevara gave on it, and that's the function of voluntary labour is to get people to make that shift in their consciousness where they don't associate work with remuneration, but they associate it with, you

know, the social development which benefits them as an individual as part of the society. Very, very complicated. But in Cuba, people are still receiving salaries, and the salaries were capped for this period that we're talking about. They've been capped. And very important to note that they are capped for political leaders and bureaucrats, right? This, this again, was another measure to prevent the emergence of a non-clature, I think the term is, you know, the sort of bureaucratic elite. And so that's the way that it remained. It was not one salary for all work, as was declared, you know, when in, I think it was 2008 or nine or something, they started to remove the cap on salaries for certain roles, but that was to increase

productivity and productive areas, and it was not applied to those police. leaders and bureaucratic leaders and so on and so forth. But there's something really important to say about salaries because one of the criticisms thrown about Cuba, oh, look at the, you know, the salaries are so low, doctors get $20 a month, right? And that's true. But what is the function of a salary in a society? Well, a function of a salary full stop is to allow the recipient, the worker, to access the things that they need to, in very crude terms, is like, like to reproduce yourself, right? To survive, to subsist, to come back and work for another day under capitalism. But in Cuba, a salary doesn't have the same requirement because so much of what is

in that basket of needs is provided free or heavily subsidised by the state. So me in Britain and you in the US, your salary needs to cover the cost of your rent or mortgage. or whatever it is. Maybe you've bought your home, lucky you. But it also has to pay for your food, your utility bills, your transport, medical bills, which is something that, you know, you've got added to yours, which I don't. I mean, university students in the US leave where, oh, it's just scary amounts, hundreds of thousands. Anyway, so, you know, you start your working life with immense debt. But in Cuba, you see your salary doesn't have that same function. Right. And that's why some economists have done this sort of exercise where you give an economic

value to the goods or the things, the services which Cubans receive provided free by the government, give an economic value. When you add that to the salaries, actually the Cubans end up being among the highest earners in Latin America. Now, the situation has changed while we're talking. I just want to say that before any listeners criticize. because the amounts of state provision has been reduced with austerity and economic crisis, and because certain things that they've done, like the unification of the currencies, and we're talking way later than the period we're focusing on, but 2021, has led to really high and brutal for the Cuban's inflation, brutal because they're not used to it, right?

So prices are controlled, have been controlled in socialist Cuba. that's a really important thing to say. You're more capable of controlling prices when you have a high level of state ownership. Cuba, among all the socialist countries, before the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern European Socialist countries, had, I think, the highest level of state ownership. It was a very rigid planning system

because they didn't have sort of big sector of private interests that, you know, could undercut the plan or that they had to, you know, be built into the planning system. And it had a tiny, well, so it had 15, in 1989, let's say the snapshot before the collapse of the socialist book, only 15,000 self-employed people. 25% of agriculture was in non-state hands, which was still very low compared to the rest of the Soviet bloc, but that could be cooperatives or private. and, you know, the whole banking system was under state control, trade.

The state had a monopoly on trade. So it was one of the most state-dominated and rigidly planned economies in the socialist world by 1989. Thank you for that. And yeah, it just brings up such interesting questions in relation to why we work, right? how might our productivity be increased, right? And also what we need to use our salaries for, right? And that's just such a stark thing to point out that if all that Cubans receive by way of having their needs met is calculated in terms of salary,

there's some of the wealthiest people. That's really fascinating. And, you know, just to go into this lived reality, because I think this is one of the key things I wanted to get, it from this conversation. So we can understand, hopefully, that, you know, free health care. Okay, we can understand going to the doctor and not having to pay. Okay. We can understand free education, going and getting a degree or education and not having to pay. What about housing and food? Is there a subsidy on food? Is there a ration? Like you get X amount of kilos of rice or

that kind of thing? And also housing, are you guaranteed a house? And the complexity. cities around that. So just like for those of us who are in capitalist nations who can't fathom, we can fathom them at free medical care, free health care, free education. But what about housing and food? What does what does that look like in socialist Cuba? So those are brilliant questions because I think that sometimes when you're immersed in Cuba, you kind of, and certainly Cubans take for granted all of this stuff. They call them that Los Lorros, the achievements of the Cuban Revolution, and in fact they're so kind of part of their daily lives that even the Cubans who think they would like to see capitalism. You know, they don't contemplate that, meaning the withdrawal of these provisions which are very much provided by socialism in Cuba because none of them were provided before.

So in terms of, let me take, housing. So there's multiple different programs in different periods to increase housing for Cubans. And housing is considered a human right and constitutional right equally to healthcare and education. There's also at the same time an explosion of the population, it goes up massively. Of course it does. It goes up with infant mortality falling, which reaches by 2005 less than four per thousand, you know, from the kind of figures that we see in Haiti. and people are living a lot longer.

So overcrowding is a problem in Cuba, but everyone's guaranteed a home. And at the same time, housing construction programs are also obstructed because of the US blockade, right? That's true with everything. They can't, I just remember being at this fascinating conference in Havana

of Latin America. It was a hemispheric Latin American conference and Fidel Castro was there. And he was talking about the need to increase intra-Latin American trade. And he was talking about, you know, Uruguay has concrete and, because the Cubans, there is a limit to the resources that they have internally. So their house building program has struggled for the same reason that, you know,

we're also under blockaded, a blockade situation. You're constantly balancing the scarce resources, you know, how much needs to go to health care and how much needs to go to housing. but they have had remarkable programs and anyone who goes to Cuba can go to like if you go to the cities and then go out of it you'll see these massive buildings that have been constructed since the Cuban revolution for creating communities and so on so they have done that and they've used different mechanisms so briefly in the 1980s they had a mechanism to encourage people to get credit from the government and build their own houses or extend their own houses as families grew and so on.

So this has happened, but clearly there is a problem, you know, a material resource problem with underdevelopment. I have to say that 90, let me get this correct. I think it's 94 or 96% of the Cuban population own the home they live in. For those remaining people who rent, legally, the rent is not allowed to be more than 4% of your income. So that is, you know, when I know how much of my salary goes on rent, I mean, that's just extraordinary. The situation, of course, has deteriorated in reality in recent years, but we're focusing on this period. And that's the situation that they have arrived at. And in fact, one of the first measures of the revolutionary government in January, I think it was, or maybe March, 1959, was to cut rents in half when they were still

in private hands. And then, of course, they nationalised property. So there was no more private renting. So Cubans were allowed in this period to have two homes. They could have two homes in different places. So that could be city and country or city and seaside. So you'll get a lot of, for example, fishermen or fishermen communities and they have a, you know, like a cabin, a hut at the shore, the coast, sorry, and they also have a home in the city. So you were allowed to have two homes. For most of the period, there was a brief in the 80s, again under the Soviet system, and there was more market mechanisms briefly opened. There was a period in which Cubans could privately sell and exchange homes, but in general for the period we're talking about,

there was a government agency that facilitated home swabs. So if you would say to the government agency, right, I have now two grown-up children and they need to move out. So you tell the government, I'm going to swap my big house for two small ones or whatever. And the government would find someone who prepare you up with people whose situation match. And they could tell you, right, you need to pay a thousand pesos to make this value equivalent. I mean, it's sort of well known that, you know, deals were done under the table, but that basically dominated the system again, except for the 1980s. And until, I think it was 2008 under Raul, or maybe a couple of years after that,

that they started to open up the sort of housing market again. So it's now just, you know, private sales can take place. But that is how they've got to the situation where housing has been really important. Wow, it's really fascinating, both in terms of, yeah, the attempts and what is so starkly different, right? How many people own their homes and how few people rent and then how low rent is in terms of your salary. That's really striking. And then, you know, also what has been challenging, right? And I know that for my experience being in Cuba, I know someone who his kind of family home was on one side of the country but wanted to live in Havana.

And so couldn't find, couldn't afford housing in Havana and lived in a real, like, constructed home, right? Not a, like, kind of a, you know, it really felt, yeah, like he, like he created it himself. And I don't know how, like, legal the structure was, right? And so I think the challenges still persist. And yet compared with what we have in the U.S., there are definitely some differences and benefits to that. There is another, sorry, really important element, which is in the period that we, we're talking about up to the like 1990. Also foreigners, with a few exceptions, some in around the Hemingway Bay. That's an exception and also maybe people who live, foreigners who

lived and worked, but foreigners were not allowed to buy properties. And that is so important because it's a measure to guard against the kind of dominational control that US individuals had, U.S. businessman, you know, the mafia and the casinos and so on, that that can't come back. Since then, there may be exceptions if you are a foreigner who lives permanently in Cuba, but most foreigners who say they have a home in Cuba, actually it's been bought officially by a Cuban and registered in their name. So, yeah, that's another important factor. Yeah, thanks for adding that. And, yeah, of course, we think about Airbnb or rental properties, right, vacation homes in a lot of our communities and how it can make it

really hard for people to live in the communities that they want to. So let's go to food. I'd love to hear about, you know, we have this idea that under socialism, there's these long breadlines and scarcity of food. And of course, I know right now with the increasing economic strangulation and the oil blockade, that food has been impacted. but tell us a little bit about how do people meet their food needs, particularly in this period that we're talking about from the revolution up to the special period. So from the revolution up to the special period,

so in, I think it was 1962, because of food scarcity that emerged, partly because of this chaos of them trying to, you know, drop all the sugar production and grow other props and then not having the sales, and partly because of the blockade was already being implemented. And remember they'd imported most of their food from the US. And suddenly that was cut off overnight.

So in 1962, they first introduced a ration book, right? So this is an allowance for every individual and household in Cuba. And the ration book was only ever intended to be temporary, but it remained. It became part of Cuban life. And so in every neighbourhood, there is a bordeaux. a place where you go with your ration book to get the supplies that you're entitled to. And in the period that we're talking about, that was ample. So, you know, you would pay a symbolic amount, which was centaavos of Cuban pesos,

so even the poorest Cubans and pensioners could afford it. And you would get most, I mean, Cubans who talk about the 1980s, this is one of the kind of nostalgic memories is when the ration book covered most of their needs, right? because it even had things like rum and cigarettes and things for women's periods and clothes were involved. And then you get your rice, as we talked about, the importance of rice, eggs, chicken, and pork and so on. So the ration book has existed. It was a very important feature of this, but also the other aspects of food is that most workplaces supplied food for their workers or students would get their lunches in the institutions that they were studying.

So, you know, you'll imagine working in a factory or an office and, you know, at lunch, everyone goes and lines up in the cafeteria and you get your food included. And that was also another element of why, you know, just judging a Cuban salary is an inadequate analysis. Now, these things continued, and it wasn't until, like, the Raoul-Castro mandate, that there was a reduction in the provision of food in workplaces. And certainly we'll talk about this when we talk about the collapse of Soviet bloc,

but this was one of the incentives for keeping people in work, even when their factories were paralyzed because there were no imports, was because people were getting fed. It was keeping people alive. So that was the way it was. And the ration book, I should say, still exists. It has been out of necessity reduced. because of the crisis

and I cannot imagine the situation, I mean I can imagine I was in Cuba in January and the situation is that they have things that are their allocation on the ration book but they're just not available and really waiting for a

solidarity shipment from Mexico or wherever. So yeah, that was the situation with food. The Cubans have never conquered this dependence on food imports. And, you know, I used to wonder, coming from a sort of economic agronomy point of view, like, why have they failed? They've campaigned. There's speeches. There's attempts. There's efforts to

take state land. I said it was like, you know, 75% of agricultural production was in state hands. This was split up after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and to hand it out to cooperatives, to convert a lot to cooperatives, 43,000 new cooperatives, also to individuals in Eusephruct, which means that the state continues to own the land, but it's a rent-free loan, and the producer gives a small proportion to a collective, which might go to the schools or workplaces, and then they can sell the rest. So they have tried many different mechanisms, material incentives, to get people back to the country, to get them working, and when they're there to produce more. and none of them have worked.

But you know when I started to do more work on the situation with climate change in Cuba, then you'd go and see the specialists who would tell you about these cyclical periods of drought. You know, we're talking about droughts that last three to five years. And so you can see that it's more complicated than saying, well, can't they just sew food and grow food and distribute it through the ration book or through markets or whatever? And, you know, the challenge is definitely multifaceted because it's to do with the environment. Even now, the blockade, the question of seeds, the question of equipment.

I remember a debate between two Cubans in the early 2000s when they took a historic decision to shut down half of the countries to sugar refineries. Massive deal, right, because sugar's been at the heart of Cuba's economy for so long. It had shifted. Cuba was no longer the biggest. productive sector or export sector, but they shut half of them down because it had become cheaper to import sugar than it was to produce and export it. And there was a question of what they did, first of all with the workers, and many of them were participants in what was called the Battle of

ideas. There's a whole chapter in my book about it. They got education, they got training. But then there was a question of what to do with the land. And this argument between the two Cubans went like this. One was saying, you know, they made a big mistake. Instead of getting workers retrained, they should have got them to work the land, right, to work to diversify our production. And the other said, with what tools, with what sees, with what, you know, they didn't have, okay, they shifted, it's organic. I mean, that's another really important aspect of this.

But just to finish this point, they didn't have the material inputs that they would have needed to diversify. And then there's the environmental problem. but it is something that it is a terrible shame during the special period which we'll talk about. There was an incredible movement from individuals and then communities to like grow their own fruit and veg and distribute it to neighbors and need. We're seeing a little bit of that in the current period but not really enough. The other aspects of food production, which I mean it would be totally remiss to neglect. So after I talked about the continued dependence on sugar exports, because the Soviet Union was buying at such favorable prices in exchange for the things that Cuba was getting.

But the other aspect was the mechanization of agriculture. So Cuba enters what was known at this time as the Green Revolution. It's kind of ironic. It actually means an increased use of tractors and chemical fertilizers and so on inspired. I mean, other countries like Brazil and India were really into that. And Cuba had more tractors per person than anywhere else in Latin America. It's sorry, I think even then the United States. There's a wonderful documentary called The Power of Community, How Cuba Survived Pecoran.

They have their figures. I think they had like 90,000 tractors in Cuba. And it was obviously, you know, really bad for the environment. So after the collapse of the Soviet blog, when all of this, stops, right? There's no more diesel coming in. There's no more chemical fertilizers. None of these input, I mean, food imports drop by 60%. And these 90,000 tractors are left to rust. And so the Cubans shift. That's one of the reasons they break up their big state farms because a smaller farm with a family or co-op can manage it organically and without the huge machinery and tractors

that are required for bigger sort of agribusiness. And they moved to organic. And, farming and is actually part of the law. So urban agriculture is by law organic. It's prohibited to use chemical fertilizers. I mean, there may be uses when someone just puts a few drops on if they're fighting a disease or a plague on a certain crop. But in general, apart from the remaining state export farms, which are like tobacco and sugar, that do use some chemicals, almost the rest of agriculture in Cuba is organic and that's had an amazing impact on the environment but also on bees on the bee population. I actually one of the documentaries that I've co-produced with Danny Films is called Cuban Bees

the Organic Revolution and you know how this is so good for the bees and for the honey that we we derive from the bees as well. So yeah those are really important elements, many different forms of agricultural organization. So by the 1990s, Cuba had something like 10 different forms of agricultural organizations. So there was different forms of cooperative that had slightly different relationships and rules. They had state farms. They had family farms and private farms. So, you know, they've tried a lot of things.

And unfortunately, I mean, now it's more tragic than ever. They haven't been able to conquer this historic dependence, or historically imposed dependence on food imports. So in this conversation, we have gone from the revolution up to 1991, the Soviet collapse, and that's where we will head for our next conversation. And where you just brought us to, in terms of the food, is, yeah, that funny phrase, the green revolution, which was actually very industrialized and heavily dependent on oil and fertilizers and tractors, as you mentioned. So we're leaving the food system there, right there.

And then you also mentioned rectification. right, that that type of planning that goes away from the Soviet Union style planning, so we'll leave it there. And you've gone over the different elements of the attempts of socialism throughout those decades leading up to the special period. So before we close, is there anything else you'd like to say to set us up for our next conversation? So if you think about right before the Soviet collapse, if you just give us a picture of how things we're feeling, how things were looking in terms of the economics of socialism in Cuba? Well, I think I've made a really important point that drawing on the warnings of Che Guevara from the early 1960s, Fidel Castro and the Cuban leadership had recognized the direction of travel in the socialist bloc that capitalism was returning, and they had pulled Cuba

away and sort of return to those models of, as I said, kind of domestic or organic kind of forms of organisation and a return to, you know, mobilisation was very important. In this period where, again, we'll see that when the crisis hits, they deepen their democratic system and their participation once again. So they set up people's councils in the early nine. 1990s, which are new institutions to give local neighbourhoods more control, more power over decisions that are made to identify problems, particularly in this terrible period of economic crisis, socioeconomic problems, and hands them some resources to help them deal with it,

and to have this feedback mechanism from the grassroots to the top, which becomes such a distinctive feature of the post-Soviet period. which I look forward to talking to you about in our next podcast. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Helen Yaffe, Professor of Latin American Political Economy at the University of Glasgow. She's the author of We Are Cuba, How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World and Che Guevara, the Economics of Revolution.

She's also the co-host of the Cuba Analysis Podcast. Please check the show notes for links to any. of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Roberto Carcasses for the intermission music. The cover art for today's episode is from a 1967 film poster by Antonio Reboiro titled A Forest is Growing. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support.

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