cuba 2.0, publicación digital del PDC-Cuba

Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart at Ms. Reinhart’s Washington home. They started their book around 2003, years before the economy began to crumble. | Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times

THE advertisement warns of speculative financial bubbles. It mocks a group of gullible Frenchmen seduced into a silly, 18th-century investment scheme, noting that the modern shareholder, armed with superior information, can avoid the pitfalls of the past. "How different the position of the investor today!" the ad enthuses.

It ran in The Saturday Evening Post on Sept. 14, 1929. A month later, the stock market crashed.

"Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors," says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. "They’re wrong. And we can prove it."

Description

For Cuba's supporters, health is the most commonly cited evidence of the socialist system's success. Even critics often concede that this is the country's saving grace. Cuba's health statistics are indeed extraordinary. This small island outperforms virtually all of its neighboring countries and all countries of the same level of economic development. Some of its health statistics rival wealthy industrialized countries. Moreover, these health outcomes have resulted against all odds.

Setting out to unravel this puzzle, the author finds that Cuba possesses an unusually high level of popular participation and cooperation in the implementation of health policy. This has been achieved with the help of a longstanding government that prioritizes public health, and has enough political influence to compel the rest of the community to do the same. On the other hand, popular participation in decision-making regarding health policy is minimal, which contrasts with the image of popular participation often promoted. Political elites design and impose health policy, allowing little room for other health sector groups to meaningfully contribute to or protest official decisions. This is a problem because aspects of health care that are important to those who use the system or work within it can be neglected if they do not fit within official priorities.

1. Uno de los lamentos más repetidos estos días es: devorado por la prisa y la celebridad, no dejó una obra sólida, ordenada. Otro, no menos popular, advierte: su trabajo está tan disperso, sus textos son tan dispares y a veces tan coyunturales, que no será fácil organizar sus Obras Completas. Pero, seriamente, ¿es eso motivo para lamentarse? En vida Carlos Monsiváis no necesitó ordenar sus escritos en un corpus coherente y unitario para construir una de las obras más destacadas de la cultura mexicana; ¿por qué habría de necesitarlo en la muerte? En vez de concentrar sus dardos en un solo sitio, prefirió no tener centro y diseminarse en textos marginales, lo mismo ensayos sobre poesía mexicana que crónicas sobre la ciudad de México, estampas de estrellitas pasajeras o notas periodísticas sobre esta o aquella minucia. ¿Para qué traicionarlo entonces y atar todo en unos tomos gruesos e inmanejables? ¿No sería mejor librarlo del trato reservado a los Grandes Autores Nacionales y dejar que su obra se conserve y propague a través de, digamos, antologías sesgadas e inventivas?