THOSE CRITICS OF CUBA WHO RECOGNIZE THE revolution’s economic and social accomplishments often dismiss them as products of Soviet largess. Soviet economic aid to Cuba has indeed been massive and crucial to the economy’s operation. Yet the size of this aid has been vastly overstated by the Central Intelligence Agency, the source of most media and “scholarly” claims. The CIA bases its estimate on the artificial official peso/dollar ex- change rate, on sugar prices from the residual world market (which covers only 15% of sugar sales), and on the assump- tion that the quality, assortment and price of Soviet goods sold to Cuba are equal to those on the world market. These premises are unjustifiable. Further, since 1986 Cuba has paid above the world market price for Soviet petroleum, and the CIA has not adjusted its estimate for this fact. (Prazitelstvenniv Vestnik, the weekly magazine of the Soviet Council of Ministers, reported that in 1988 Cuba paid 1.9 billion rubles above market price for Soviet goods–1.3 billion for oil and .6 billion for machinery, equipment and transportation.) Were these assumptions appropriately ad- justed, the actual value of Soviet aid would be closer to $2 billion a year rather than the usually cited $5 billion. Even $2 billion, however, would place Cuba near the top of bilateral aid recipients in Latin America in per capita terms. Thus, Soviet aid has been very generous and very important to Cuban growth. But the assessment of the impact of outside forces on economic growth cannot stop here. Cuba has also suffered tremendously from the U.S. economic blockade. Some esti- mates put the cost at over $15 billion. And Cuba itself has maintained an exceptionally generous aid program toward other Third World nations. On balance, it is highly problem- atic to attribute Cuba’s economic and social gains to favor- able external forces.
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