The Cuban state decision-making process during reforms (1990-2018)

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in 1990 presented Cuba with significant challenges, leading to economic, social, and political impacts. The government introduced policies aimed at making the centrally planned economy more efficient, expanding private sector participation, and implementing monetary policies to stabilize the Cuban peso and control inflation. However, the counter-reform movement interrupted the pace of these policies by the end of the 1990s. In 2007, Fidel Castro formally relinquished his positions, and his brother, Raúl Castro, took over, facing another economic crisis in the midst of the global financial downturn. Raúl Castro initiated economic transformations known as “Updating,” but similar to the 1990s, a counter-reform movement caused the reform process to stall and reverse. ☐ Academics from various disciplines have examined these periods of crises, reforms, and counter-reforms in Cuba, seeking to understand and explain their complexities. Most studies have adopted either an institutional/bureaucratic perspective or focused on ideological theories to account for the inconsistent and fragmented nature of the Cuban reforms. This dissertation, however, introduces a novel approach by advocating for the incorporation of the decision-making process (DMP) in the analysis of the Cuban cycles of crisis-reform-counter-reform. To this end, the research employs the prospect theory model, originally formulated by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), which has found numerous applications in policymaking and state decision-making. ☐ The dissertation argues that including the DMP in these analyses contributes to answering lingering questions about who and how decisions are made in Cuba in periods of high uncertainty, like economic crises. It also offers an alternative view why Cuban leaders backtracked the reform intention at some point into the reforms and why a counter-reform movement emerged. The inclusion of the prospect theory model allowed the dissertation to develop a dynamic model of DMP that adds to the bureaucratic and ideological models to explain the cycles of crisis-reform-counter-reform in Cuba.