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The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two Decade Appraisal. By Carmelo Mesa-Lago. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981. vii + 235 pp. $17.50 cloth; $9.95 paper.)

The desire to assess the economic results of the Cuban revolution without resort to crude ideological argument is a laudable one. Carmelo Mesa-Lago has struggled admirably with political bias, unreliable and inadequate statistics, and the thorny problem of what to count and what the numbers mean. On all of these levels, his book is successful, but flawed. Nonetheless, it is generally considered the best analysis of the performance of the Cuban economy between 1959 and 1979. For most readers and reviewers Mesa-Lago is thorough and objective. The author frankly describes himself as a middle-class Cuban who left the island in 1961 because he had become "increasingly alienated by revolutionary attitudes on religion, ideology and civil freedoms." He considers himself neither "an adversary nor an activist sympathizer of the Revolution" and has "tried to assume a relatively detached, balanced, and objective attitude." Nonetheless, he says that his "value framework and legal training favors political pluralism and civil freedoms as well as social justice, while my economic training emphasizes efficiency and economic rationality" (p. 207). This description is important, because the book's conclusions seem to follow from it. As a liberal, Mesa-Lago concludes that Cuba's commitment to socialism led to governmental actions that suppressed pluralism and civil freedoms, while as a neoclassical economist he concludes that the socialization of the economy was contrary to efficiency and economic rationality. Overall, he judges that while certain of the revolution's egalitarian goals—full employment, elimination of poverty—were admirable, their pursuit in defiance of market requirements assured the failure of the revolution's other goals: economic growth, diversification, and economic independence. Unlike authors highly critical of the revolution, Mesa-Lago acknowledges that the welfare of many Cubans has improved—in health care, education, employment, and social security. Despite these gains, however, he agrees with the growing consensus that Cuba's economy is inefficient, stagnant, dependent on Soviet subsidies, and still tied to the price of sugar on the world market. Indeed, his own extensive research has done much to establish the statistical evidence of this economic failure.