What peasants taught the Revolution: An alternative reading of the re-emergence of self-employment in Cuba

• In Event: New Economies Under Socialism

Abstract

After two decades of gradually opening spaces for self-employment, at least 15% of Cuba’s workforce now work as, or for, a new economic class of cuentapropistas. This development has prompted debate on the nature of the emerging class, and on its place in the changing theories of socialism. The dominant narratives, both from neoclassical and Marxist perspectives, analyze the phenomenon primarily as a partial restoration of capitalist relations, with a strengthening third position that appreciates it as a shift of the socialist model towards self-management and cooperativism. However, within this ongoing debate on the compatibility of labor self-direction and societal objectives of equality under a ‘new socialism’, the connection with Cuba’s extensive history of autonomous peasant production is too often neglected. This paper questions how, and to what degree, the ‘historically-accidental’, yet highly successful presence of self-employed agropecuarios within Cuba’s socialist model influenced the government’s perception of self-employment in general, thus contributing to the escalation of cuentapropismo from agriculture to other sectors. Taking this perspective also allows connecting the relatively novel research on cuentapropistas with the mature discipline of peasant studies, which has studied the economics of self-employment and its social and political relations since the 1900s and witnessed many debates that yielded lessons applicable beyond the ‘boundaries’ of agriculture and rurality. Specifically, I argue that an adaptation of the Chayanovian theory of non-capitalist ‘nonwage economic units’ can be applied to small private businesses in situations of constrained labor, which prevail in Cuba due to restrictions to exploit non-family labor.

Author

• Louis Thiemann, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague