Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 12

Ethnic Economy:
An Abbreviated Version
Manuel Cuesta Morúa
Historian and political scientist
Spokesperson, Progressive Arc Party (Parp)
National Coordinator, Nuevo País Project
Member, Citizens’ Committee for Racial Integration (CIR)
Havana, Cuba

T

he so-called reforms to what we can already espy as Raul’s lost decade, require
consideration anew of the issue of inequality an essential factor reordering (bring up to
date) our economic model. Yet, these reforms
have also created an inevitable byproduct: a racially-based economy that is eminently poor and
definitively marginal.
The problem is that Cuba has an extractive model:
political and economic institutions are concentrated on the elites and designed so that they appropriate most of society’s resources.
Extractive models, based on many who pay rent
to the few, are relatively unproductive and feed
off business monopolies that deny social access
to a redistribution of wealth. As a matter of fact,
extractive models do indeed tend to redistribute:
through the State, by means of perverse redistribution mechanisms, in which the State’s totalitarian nature makes the distribution of goods and
services unst &