The Triumphs and Failures of Bureaucratic Socialism in Cuba, 2016-2021: Debates among Officials regarding Economics and Politics

Abstract

This analysis of the Cuban Communist Party’s institutionalization process shows and quantifies important changes among top-level personnel and political procedures such as the executive office’s depersonalization, the Party Secretariat’s defenestration (2021), and the steps to establish greater Party supremacy over the military high command. It examines the contradictory debates regarding economic policy and democracy in the three most recent Party Congresses. It highlights the fracture within the Party leadership, which paralyzed and partly reversed the economic reform. It describes the new economic opening in 2021. It assesses the official response – repression and accelerated economic reforms – to the July 2021 protests.