Cooperatives in Cuba

Argues that cooperatives have the potential to improve Cubans’ material standard of living and to strengthen the project of building socialism

This book is a broad and rich collection of contributions to the debate on cooperatives in Cuba that 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. Advocates of cooperatives have argued whether cooperatives operating in a socialist system would lose the autonomy that they consider them to have in a capitalist system. Concerning what is possible, the contributors to this collection argue that organizing large parts of the 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 the cooperative’s ability to achieve these goals is crippled by both their seriously inadequate autonomy for their economic management, and by the need to develop a broad base not only in the agricultural sector but also in the much larger nonagricultural sector of the economy. The guidelines for Cuba’s evolving new economic model clearly support both goals, and so the contributions call for the government to implement them and end its decade-long delay in promoting cooperatives in Cuba.