The model of regulation of the Cuban economy: Dollarization, planning and market

During the two-year period 1993-1994, the Cuban government carried out the most important reforms of the revolutionary period. The depth of the adopted measures responds to the need of rectifying the severe social and economic weakening in which the country is submerged after the disintegration of the socialist bloc in the late nineteen eighties. In a scenario where the crisis is combined with an incipient dollarization, the reforms initiated in September 1993 were based on the formal acceptance of such dollarization, as well as on the implementation of those measures that should facilitate a strategic use of the foreign currencies that circulated in the economy. For that purpose, the government will have to accept, not without a certain amount of pragmatism, a reform that transforms the economic model adopted in the early sixties. This article portrays the general traits of the new model. Within such framework of analysis, the article concentrates on the changes that have taken place in the specific field of economic regulation, where dollarization, central planning and market succeed at coexisting and at acting as complements of each other while serving the same goal.