Jorge Domínguez: "Can Cuba's leaders govern?"

Professor Jorge Dominguez delivers the Ernesto Betancourt Keynote Address at the 22nd Annual Meetings of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

Miami, Florida, August 2-4, 2012. 

As I tweeted at the time, the take away of his excellent talk for me was this:

While Fidel Castro may have had many cockeyed economic ideas that led to periodic unrealistic all-or-nothing mobilizations that often ended in disaster, when that "Comandante-en-jefe" gave an order, it was followed.

Under Raúl, Domínguez argued, economic policies are much more pragmatic, realistic, and potentially beneficial, but due to what Domínguez called a pernicious "bureaucratic insurgency" there is an epidemic of foot dragging with Raúl's economic "updating" policies.

That is, under Raúl Cuba's "bureaucratocracy" fails or refuses to implement his policies, thus significantly weakening the state


Professor Jorge Dominguez delivers the Ernesto Betancourt Keynote Address from Asce Web Presence on Vimeo.