The Ideological Challenges of Cuban Socialism

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18783758
• Author: William M. LeoGrande
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 156–164

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18783758

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

156

Book Review

The Ideological Challenges of Cuban Socialism

by

William M. LeoGrande

Steve Cushion A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped

the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Katherine A. Gordy Living Ideology in Cuba: Socialism in Principle and Practice. Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.

Jorge I. Domínguez, María del Carmen Zabala Argüelles, Mayra Espina Prieto, and

Lorena Barberia (eds.) Social Policies and Decentralization in Cuba: Change in the Context

of 21st Century Latin America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Danielle Pilar Clealand The Power of Race in Cuba: Racial Ideology and Black Consciousness

during the Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Devyn Spence Benson Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

As Cuba updates its economy by expanding the role of markets and the private sec-

tor, the issue of ideology is center stage. The Conceptualización del modelo económico y

social cubano de desarrollo socialista unveiled at the Seventh Congress of the Cuban

Communist Party in 2016 lays out a vision for a “sustainable and prosperous” social-

ism, but it incorporates elements of what appear to be two contending ideological posi-

tions within the leadership: the view that the reforms must go faster and farther in order

to promote economic growth and the view that they should go more slowly to minimize

the social and political costs of change. Thus the Conceptualización calls for the growth

and juridical recognition of the private sector but only within a system in which state

property is predominant and no one can accumulate wealth. It calls for expanding the

role of markets but strictly regulating them within a system in which state planning

directs the economy. It calls for wages to be proportionate to the productivity of work,

though that will inevitably generate inequality, while promising that no one will be left

behind.

Despite their disparate subjects, all of the books under consideration here share an

interest in the ideology of Cuba’s revolutionary project—its origins, core values, chal-

lenges, and expression in everyday life. Steve Cushion sees the roots of Cuban socialism

in the radicalism of the prerevolutionary labor movement led by the Popular Socialist

Party (the pre-1959 communists). Katherine Gordy explores the revolution’s core values

of equality, nationalism, and political unity as their meaning and practice have evolved

from the 1960s to the present. The contributors to the volume edited by Jorge I.

Domínguez etal. examine the social impacts of Cuba’s economic reforms, the challenge

those reforms pose to core social values, and the government’s policy response. Danielle

Pilar Clealand and Devyn Spence Benson both analyze the shortcomings of the antiracist

William M. LeoGrande is a professor of government and dean emeritus of the School of Public

Affairs at American University in Washington, DC.

783758LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18783758Latin American PerspectivesLeoGrande / Book Review

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