The Cuban Economy in the 1990s: External Challenges and Policy Imperatives

1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 117-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. M. Ritter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
International System ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Convertible Currency ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S

Cuba has entered the decade of the 1990s in a state of profound existential crisis. The countries of Eastern Europe, whose economic and political institutions and ideologies were adopted by Cuba, albeit with some modifications, were abandoning those same institutions and ideologies. Cuba's place in the international system had become one of growing isolation: Cuba had become a curiosity from the 1960s rather than the wave of the future, as it once perceived itself. By mid-1990, it appeared almost certain that the generous subsidization of the Cuban economy by the Soviet Union was about to end. Moreover, the Cuban economy was in serious difficulty as a result of some external factors, namely the convertible currency debt crisis and the problems and uncertainties in its relationship with the Soviet Union since 1985, but also as a result of internal institutional incapacities and deformities.

Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

‘Working Towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Kershaw
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

The renewed emphasis, already visible in the mid-1980s, on the intertwined fates of the Soviet Union and Germany, especially in the Stalin and Hitler eras, has become greatly intensified in the wake of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. The sharpened focus on the atrocities of Stalinism has prompted attempts to relativise Nazi barbarism – seen as wicked, but on the whole less wicked, than that of Stalinism (and by implication of communism in general).1 The brutal Stalinist modernising experiment is used to remove any normative links with humanising, civilising, emancipatory or democratising development from modernisation concepts and thereby to claim that Hitler's regime, too, was – and intentionally so – a ‘modernising dictatorship’.2 Implicit in all this is a reversion, despite the many refinements and criticisms of the concept since the 1960s, to essentially traditional views on ‘totalitarianism’ and to views of Stalin and Hitler as ‘totalitarian dictators’.

The Politics of Plenty

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Betts
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

Chronicling the failure of communist regimes to match the consumer desires of its citizens has become shorthand for rereading the events of 1989 as a Whiggish victory of Western ‘soft power’ over its more militaristic, hard-line Soviet rival. However, consumerism did play a key role in communism. The essay explores the meanings of consumerism from the 1930s, when the Soviet Union attempted to accommodate shifts from long-preached ascetism and sacrifice to an increasing yearning to get and spend. In Eastern Europe in the 1960s communist governments used the Great Leap Forward in ‘consumer socialism’ to showcase their political legitimacy. Yet consumerism aroused acquisitive appetites that the state could not satisfy and thus subjected the populace to cycles of arousal and frustration. Seemingly banal problems of provisioning shaded into trenchant political criticisms of communism’s ability to make good on its material promises, a key factor in the collapse of communism.

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