ABSTRACT
When it comes to fashionable trends in ‘neo-liberal globalization’, ‘structural adjustment programmes’, ‘market orthodoxy’, and ‘transitional’ or ‘postsocialist’ regimes, Cuba is often considered to be the exception to the rule. Despite the efforts of Washington’s allies in Miami, the US economic embargo, the lack of access to international financial credit, and a turbulent economic crisis caused by the fall of the Socialist Bloc, Cuba remains firm in adhering to the Communist Party’s (PCC) principle of state supremacy over the market. Ten years have passed since the end of the Cold War and, almost miraculously, Cuba’s state-run market – which has undergone a series of autochthonous reforms – continues to experience real social and economic growth. However, the revolutionary leadership’s success in surviving global pressures to privatize state corporations has not come to the fore without real structural changes in Cuba’s line of production. Although Fidel Castro and the PCC leadership contend that the structural changes experienced in Cuba’s political economy during the last decade have nothing to do with neo-liberalism, scant attention has been given to the striking similarities between the outcome of market-like reforms and the typical trends in the ‘modes’ of production found elsewhere (Castro 2000). Naturally, this study should concentrate on the condition of labour in Cuba and its transformation since the application of certain market reforms. By conditions of labour I mean here the various changes in working conditions and the wage framework, employment/unemployment, relations between workers and management, normative or legal standards in labour policy regarding flexibility and worker representation in public and governmental bodies.
