ABSTRACT

In his seminal book, The Stages of Economic Growth, late MIT professor of economics Walt Whitman Rostow defines five hierarchical stages of economic development: traditional society; transitional stage: the preconditions for take-off; take-off; drive to maturity and the age of high mass consumption. This chapter shows that Cuba had amply met all three of Rostow's conditions for take-off before the Revolution arrived. In fact, the island had solidly entered its take-off stage coincident with the early days of World War II and the signing of Cuba's 1940 Constitution. This is why, by the dawn of 1959, Cuba's socioeconomic conditions was already beginning to transition toward Rostow's fourth stage of development, the drive to maturity, and why, correspondingly, a number of the metrics show Cuba's world standing as commensurate with that of countries that were in that stage of economic development and, in some cases, even in stage five.