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Cuba

A Vietnamese Recipe For Cuba's Reforms?

Havana's Plaza de la Revolution
Havana's Plaza de la Revolution
Daniel Emilio Rojas Castro

-Analysis-

BOGOTA — Cuba, in its effort to loosen the economy and move toward a partially free market system, may be borrowing a page from the history of another communist country, Vietnam.

Starting in 1986, Vietnam implemented a series of economic reforms known collectively as Doi Moi. The changes were inspired by the industrialization drive taking place at that time in Asia's so-called "Tiger" economies as well as by the liberalization of land ownership in China promoted in the 1970s by Deng Xiaoping.

Doi Moi did not prompt the Vietnamese communist party to end its rule, and the state retained control of strategic sectors of the economy. But the state did end its monopoly on international trade, allowed local government to form trading firms and increased participation by the private and cooperative sectors in the production of lower added-value goods.

Liberalization of the farming sector included distribution of part of the country's arable lands to a segment of the population as private owners, the elaboration of contracts between individuals, and formation of state cooperatives to manage certain stages of rural production. Farmers were allowed to retain any outstanding harvests beyond quotas owed to the state, which in turn provided them with incentives to sell the surplus in the country's embryonic internal market.

Ultimately, Doi Moi helped establish a socialist-oriented market economy, a term coined by the architect of reforms, Nguyen Van Linh, the communist party boss whose policies were compared to the Soviet Perestroika.

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Nguyen Van Linh, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam from 1986 to 1991 — Photo: Wikimedia Commons

What's happening in Cuba right now is by no means a carbon copy of the Vietnamese experience. The similarities, nevertheless, are too evident to be ignored.

The so-called updating of the Cuban economic model, which President Raúl Castro began in 2009, includes a gradual transformation of the farming sector through the handover of lands for private use by individuals. So far Cuba has transferred 1.58 million hectares of land within this arrangment. A few years from now, Cuban farmers will likely be selling their excess produce in an agricultural market free of state control.

Raúl Castro does not expect economic liberalization to foster multi-party democracy. The Vietnamese experience is relevant in that sense as well. The Cuban government intends to keep the single-party structure, just as the Vietnamese communist party remains the dominant political force in its country.

In the case of Vietnam, the people in power were able to appear more pluralist and "legitimate" and thus garner popular support by establishing the Vietnamese Fatherland Front. Whether Cuba decides to follow that lesson as well remains to be seen.

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Society

Influencer Union? The Next Labor Rights Battle May Be For Social Media Creators

With the end of the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, the creator economy is the next frontier for organized labor.

​photograph of a smartphone on a selfie stick

Smartphone on a selfie stick

Steve Gale/Unsplash
David Craig and Stuart Cunningham

Hollywood writers and actors recently proved that they could go toe-to-toe with powerful media conglomerates. After going on strike in the summer of 2023, they secured better pay, more transparency from streaming services and safeguards from having their work exploited or replaced by artificial intelligence.

But the future of entertainment extends well beyond Hollywood. Social media creators – otherwise known as influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, vloggers and live streamers – entertain and inform a vast portion of the planet.

✉️ You can receive our Bon Vivant selection of fresh reads on international culture, food & travel directly in your inbox. Subscribe here.

For the past decade, we’ve mapped the contours and dimensions of the global social media entertainment industry. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, these creators struggle to be seen as entertainers worthy of basic labor protections.

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