"Why did the left gain despite successes in combating organized crime?" (translated)
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Cuba’s Economic Failure: Beyond the Embargo For more than six decades, Cuba’s poverty has often been explained by one claim: America’s embargo made the country poor. Repetition, however, is not evidence. A study “The Forsaken Road: Reassessing Living Standards Following the Cuban Revolution and the American Embargo,” by Bastos, Geloso and Bologna Pavlik, published in the Journal of Development Economics challenges this narrative by separating three factors: the Cuban Revolution, the American embargo, and the extensive economic support Cuba received from the Soviet Union. Their findings show a major economic divergence. Correcting weaknesses in Cuba’s GDP statistics makes the gap larger, not smaller. When Soviet assistance is excluded, Cuba’s relative performance looks even worse. For decades, central planning was heavily subsidized by an economic superpower. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, that support largely disappeared, exposing the system’s underlying weaknesses during the “Special Period.” This does not mean the American embargo was harmless. Trade restrictions impose real costs, and a 2026 critique by Francisco Rodríguez argues that the study may underestimate the embargo’s effects. Still, an embargo can make a bad economic system poorer without being the reason the system is dysfunctional. Cuba did not adopt central planning because of the embargo. The Revolution restricted private property, nationalized businesses, displaced markets with political allocation, and transferred economic decisions to the state. Cuba’s history is therefore not merely a story of American sanctions. It is also a demonstration of what happens when a market economy is replaced by political allocation and then subsidized for decades by an external power. The embargo’s costs deserve serious measurement, but it should not become an alibi for an economic system whose institutions produced persistent failure. The central question remains: Why did Cuba remain economically dysfunctional even during decades of extraordinary Soviet support?
