ABSTRACT
Cuba's developmental achievements throughout its republican period were most important because of the positive impact that this development had broadly on the island's population. This chapter demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s Cuba had attained levels of economic participation, wages, and consumption of high-quality goods and services that were comparable to those enjoyed, at the time, by the populations of some of the most advanced nations in the world. Investment in Cuba, a thorough study of the Cuban economy that the United States Department of Commerce published in 1956, concluded that "subsistence living, so prevalent in many areas of Latin America, is not characteristic of Cuba, whose national income reflects the wage economy of the country." The difference between the income that one person earns in a free-market society vs. that which is earned by another is determined by the value that society freely places on each individual's productive activities.
