Cooperatives in Cuba

Al Campbell, Beatriz Díaz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216201335
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This book is a broad and rich collection of contributions to the debate on cooperatives in Cuba and argues that they have the potential to both improve Cubans' material standard of living and to strengthen the Revolution's project of building socialism.

For almost 200 years advocates of socialism have argued about whether having cooperatives as base production units is inconsistent with socialism's requirements for a socially and democratically planned economy. Concerning what is possible, the contributors argue that organizing large parts of Cuba's existing and necessary small and medium scale production into cooperatives would be beneficial both for improving Cubans' material standard of living and for strengthening the Revolution's project of building a socialist economy. Concerning the cooperatives that exist in Cuba today, the contributors argue two factors constitute key barriers to the cooperatives' ability to achieve these goals. First, their performance is severely crippled by inadequate autonomy of cooperatives from those state institutions tasked with their management under. Second, cooperatives need to be massively developed and promoted not only in the agricultural sector where they already play such an important role, but also in the much larger nonagricultural sector of the economy, where an official program to do exactly that has been "on pause" for over a decade. Cooperatives in Cuba is a call for the Cuban government to promote an authentic cooperativization of significant parts of the small and medium productive units that are explosively developing there, as a part of its new socioeconomic model for its desired "prosperous and sustainable socialism."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Introduction
• Part I: Background
• Chapter 1: Cooperatives and Socialism in Cuba
• Chapter 2: Are Worker Cooperatives Efficient?
• Part II: Cooperatives in Revolutionary Cuba: Past and Present
• Chapter 3: A Brief History of Cuba’s Agricultural Cooperatives
• Chapter 4: The Economic Importance of Agricultural Cooperatives in Cuba
• Chapter 5: The Promise of a Cuban Cooperative Economy: A Balance One Decade Later
• Part III: Topics in Cooperativism in Cuba
• Chapter 6: Cooperatives and Gender: The Situation in Cuba
• Chapter 7: Cooperative Education and Training: The University of Havana Experience
• Chapter 8: The Creation of Second-Degree Cooperatives in Cuba: An Alternative for Strengthening Agrifood Value Chains
• Part IV: Improving Cuba’s Cooperatives: Case Studies
• Chapter 9: Cooperation and Local Sustainable Development: The Case of the Vista Hermosa Farm
• Chapter 10: Cooperative Principles, Integral Cooperative Management, and Local Development in Eastern Cuba: A Case Study of the Cooperative Benilde Orozco and Extending It
• Chapter 11: MSMEs and Cooperatives in Production Chains: Trajectories of Productos del Valle
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index