Cuba: The Morning After: Confronting Castro's Legacy

   By Mark Falcoff

   AEI Press , September 2003

   "A painstaking historical analysis . . . a detailed investigation of Cuba's current realities . . . what sober, scholarly assessments are for." -- Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Wall Street Journal

   "A sobering account of precisely what Fidel Castro's legacy is and what Cuba has to do to overcome it . . . a good map of a very uneven terrain." -- Washington Time

Americans no longer think of Cuba as a major threat. In fact, many Americans imagine that when Fidel Castro is gone, Cuba will become a free-market democracy.

The author challenges both assumptions in Cuba the Morning After, a major study of U.S.-Cuban relations. He suggests that this island is mired in history and fantasy -- in thrall to an economic and social system that does not work and cannot work. Communism has shattered a once-rich civil society, one that cannot be rapidly reconstructed, particularly in the absence of a small-business class and a freer access to organized political activity. Fear of the future, declining demographies, a culture of dependency, and a tendency to opt out for emigration to the United States add to the mixture. [more...]

Mark Falcoff, a resident scholar at AEI, is the author of the monthly Latin American Outlook and editor of The Cuban Revolution and the United States (2001).

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