ABSTRACT
The first economic treatise on Cuba in the English language was written by the late Yale professor of economics and former Federal Reserve Board Member Henry C. Wallich. This seminal work was Monetary Problems of an Export Economy: The Cuban Experience, 1914–1947. In the preface he writes: "Cuba, with its almost exclusive reliance upon sugar exports, exhibits in an extreme form some of the problems peculiar to many export economies that have not achieved advanced economic development." In stark contrast, during the period post the Revolution, the inefficiencies and systemic shortcomings of Cuba's command economic system meant that as the country expanded sugar production to sustain itself under far less efficient means of production, there were no positive corollary benefits to the Cuban economy and, instead, other industries collapsed. The inefficiency of the Cuban sugar industry, combined with decreasing market prices, meant that Cuba was receiving less and less money from purchasers of its sugar.
