The destruction of Yugoslavian socialism by the World Bank in the late 20th century is a cautionary tale as Cuba joins today’s globalized corporate economy. This is my paper, “Market Socialism in Yugoslavia and its Relevance to Cuba”, which I read on June 28, 2016, at the University of Havana.

In 2016 I spent two weeks in Cuba, as a member of a 28-person multinational delegation of cooperative movement activists and academics, organized by the Center for Global Justice. We toured worker coops and conferred at the University of Havana and the Instituto de Filosofia, with many of the people involved in the reorganization of the Cuban economy and in economic/social theory. I and others of the delegation presented papers there.

Cuba was trying to reinvent their economy with worker cooperatives in small enterprises, instead of the government trying to run the entire economy. They were still in the experimental stage, with most of the pilot programs located in Havana. They were giving over some of the existing enterprises to the workers already there, and also opened the economy to new self-organized coops, and to self-employed businesses.

In one vision, if these were successful, Cuba could generalize the system throughout the country. Under this new plan, the government would directly operate only the heights of the economy. Cuba would continue socialist planning to promote social justice through market regulation and worker coops. In my paper I present a cautionary tale of Yugoslavia. (2016)