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The persistence of the peasantry challenges conceptualizations of smallholders on both the left and the right. It also highlights the vital role that smallholders play in socio-ecosystems. This paper uses the Cuban agroecological transition to re-think the role that smallholders play in development discourse and practice. By analyzing the public policies that Cuba enacted after the Special Period, this article derives several public policy lessons – including securing land tenure, localizing food production and regulating market development – to inform smallholder-driven transition elsewhere. These lessons provide important points of departure for efforts to improve the social, economic and ecological dynamics of smallholder agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzed the importance of integrating disaster risk reduction and climate change adapting policies into the socio-economic development plans of coastal municipalities in Cuba. To this end, a literature review was carried out to locate the main theoretical and bibliographical sources on Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation, coastal municipalities and government policies and triangulate them to create a four-phase integration tool. This tool will improve the territorial development plans and make them more effective while promoting an integrated vision of disaster risk reduction and adapting to climate change as a fundamental basis for the sustainability of development in Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista Novedades en Población is the property of Universidad de La Habana, Centro de Estudios Demograficos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cooperativismo y Desarrollo (COODES) is the property of Universidad de Pinar del Rio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Cuba, the treatment of vulnerabilities in the population takes on a new tone in the current conditions. To address this social phenomenon, it is necessary to implement a methodological tool of proven effectiveness worldwide, such as the multidimensional measurement of poverty. This paper aims to explain the characteristics of multidimensional poverty measurement as a tool for improving government attention to vulnerabilities from public policies. The proposal of an Observatory as a way to achieve this task. Among the results of the work are: the elaboration of an instrument for the registration of socioeconomic information in the homes of the municipality, the formation of capacities in institutions and the municipal government, the development of a mobile application and a computer software for capturing, transmission, processing and dissemination of data collected at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study sought to understand the drivers behind civil protest participation in authoritarian contexts, explicitly focusing on Cuba. The data were sourced from 658 respondents via online surveys facilitated by CubaData, an independent social research agency specializing in Cuban studies, employing a secure panel system that guarantees the confidentiality and anonymity of participants. Our research primarily investigated the role of satisfaction with government policies in terms of the intention to participate in civil protests, introducing subjective well-being as a moderating variable. Utilizing the Process module of SMART-PLS 4 to emulate Process Model 58 for moderated mediation analysis, we accounted for measurement errors to ensure robust findings. Further controls were incorporated for age and political self-efficacy. The results revealed that subjective well-being significantly moderates the link between satisfaction with government policies and actual participation in civil protests. These findings suggest that the happiness level can change resistance dynamics within authoritarian settings. This research has implications for academic understandings of political behavior in autocratic regimes and practical applications in policy making and activism in Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Derecho Privado is the property of Universidad de los Andes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

‘Environmental justice’ refers to the human right to a healthy and safe environment, a fair share of natural resources, access to environmental information and participation in environmental decision-making. Some analysts have argued that environmental justice is undermined by the political economy of capitalism. This paper builds on this analysis by evaluating the environmental justice situation in Cuba, a country where there is little capitalist influence. Evidence is based on participant observation and interviews in Cuba, as well as secondary quantitative data. The research findings suggest that Cuba fares relatively well in terms of environmental justice, but still faces a number of challenges regarding the quality of its environment and some aspects of the environmental decision-making process. However, many of its ongoing problems can be attributed to global capitalist pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The achievements and challenges arising from the application of eHealth in the Cuban context to support universal health are presented. The Ministry of Public Health defi- ned the Computerization Strategy, whose lines of work are based on the components declared in the Strategy and Plan of Action on eHealth of the Pan American Health Organization, and in the Policy for the Computerization of the Society, approved by the Cuban Government. The paper describes the actions of the Cuban strategy elaborated to solve the limitations in the technological infrastructure, to develop the platforms, the tools and the applications required by the health services, and to stimulate the professionals' abilities to use them. The results of eHealth in Cuba are based on the application and evaluation of the strategy implemented in the framework of the improvement of the health sector through projects such as the electronic medical record called Galen Clínicas, the training of human resources and the resources for information and education from the Infomed Health Telematics Network. These models of solidarity and collaborative networking have contributed to universal health and positively impacted on the health system beyond the borders. The challenges of eHealth are the development of initiatives in mobile health --in which there is little experience--; telemedicine --a project that is stopped--; integration and interoperability among applications; the sustainability of the implemented solutions; insuffi- cient technological infrastructure; and strengthening of the legal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common assertion that Cuba's achievements in HIV/AIDS control have come at a cost in human rights is reinforced by US hostility toward its small neighbor. Nevertheless, a rights-based analysis may be one useful way of examining the actual Cuban experience. By reference to the United Nation's Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights, this paper examines the Cuban experience as it relates to the themes of quarantine and personal freedom; privacy in testing and tracing; education, participation, and non-discrimination; and the availability of AIDS treatment. The paper concludes that Cuba's quarantine period was unnecessarily prolonged in the late 1980s but that this prolonged quarantine did not target men who have sex with men. Testing and tracing procedures in Cuba follow a standard protocol, but they are more thorough than elsewhere. Cuba has strengthened participation in education programs, and treatment is now the best in the Caribbean region. The human rights implications of HIV programs must be considered in an integrated way. Selective criticisms of the Cuban program have not improved international understanding of HIV/AIDS treatment in Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the ongoing debates in Canadian higher education is the dilemma of the brain drain and the seemingly conflicting goals between the strategies and intentions of various government departments. While Citizenship and Immigration Canada aims to recruit the brightest students from across the globe to study in Canada and to enable their long-term stay as permanent residents and ultimately as citizens, the Canadian International Development Agency is mandated to strengthen human capacity in developing countries. This paper provides a critical analysis of the brain drain problem by juxtaposing Canadian policies with Cuban policies as manifested in the two countries' divergent approaches to international students and tertiary education scholarships for students from poorer countries. Following an overview of the existing scholarship programmes in both countries, ethical and philosophical considerations are examined that appear to underlie the two countries' individual-rights-based and collective-rights-based justifications for making decisions about the terms on which students from other countries are permitted to study in Canada and Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of Soviet-style "industrial" agriculture in Cuba following the end of deliveries of agricultural machinery, spare parts, petroleum, and petroleum derivatives from COMECON countries at the beginning of the 1990s left Cuba face-to-face with a gigantic food security problem, as well as potential overall economic collapse. Urban Agriculture has emerged in Cuba as a very successful, if partial, solution to the food availability problem. The aim of this paper is to analyze the technological, political, historical, and economic underpinnings of this phenomenon in Cuba, and the extent to which the Cuban experience provides potential lessons to the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Theories of cartel stability assume detection is uncertain, but also unambiguous. Recent empirical studies find that cartel agreements are contractually incomplete. If so, whether an action constitutes violation may be ambiguous. While theory emphasizes the ineffectiveness of agreements that are not fully specified ex ante, recent research shows that stable cartels may often renegotiate terms to eliminate loopholes caused by incompleteness. Naturally, renegotiations can lead to breakdowns, but sometimes threats of breakdown are resolved. This paper examines the strategy adopted by Cuban negotiators to resolve a near breakdown in the International Sugar Agreement of 1931. Cuba made a threat of retaliation credible by using a strategy of brinkmanship. The paper contributes to recent empirical work, such as Levenstein [Explorations in Economic History 33 (1996) 107; Journal of Industrial Economics 45 (2) (1997) 117] and Genesove and Mullin [American Economic Review 91 (3) (2001) 379], which uses the economics of organization to interpret cartel behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper explores the public health system's differential construction of Mexican and Cuban immigrants' "deservingness" of citizenship benefits and its preparation of them for different roles in U.S. society. Civic institutions such as the public health care system are charged with inculcating normative behavior in immigrants and instilling in them different conceptions about their rights and responsibilities. Faced with limited resources under the implementation of Medicaid managed care, hospital administrators created new categories of "deserving" and "undeserving" immigrants based on neoliberal standards of individual responsibility and self-discipline. As a result, hospital policies construct different types of "cultural citizenship" for Cuban and Mexican immigrants, preparing the former to be active citizens and discouraging the latter from pressing demands on American civil institutions. I show that this negative construction of Mexican immigrants' moral worth leads to unmet health needs and poor health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cuban geography enjoys a high status among academic disciplines since the results of geographic analysis can so clearly be integrated into planning and governmental policy. Symbolic of its prestige was the presence at a symposium of a politburo member, the President of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, who addressed the symposium and presided over the creation of a new and permanent international geographical coalition. The recently completed national atlas of Cuba was produced in Cuba using automated cartography. The area of the most notable excitement in Cuban geography is that of automated cartography and geographic information systems.

The present paper goes deeply into those determiners of qualified workforce that contribute to Cuba's economic growth. Based on estimates of production performances and accounting of such growth, elements contribution was determined, and it was corroborated that contribution of Cuban qualified workforce has been positive and meaningful, but with a tendency to decrease. As to what was previously stated, asimetries were identified regarding composition, provision, and performance of the aforementioned workforce. The main conclusion is that combination of such distortions has determined that its effective use is lower than that which is socially required and potential, all those in terms of economic growth and sustainability. Such has produced expenditures in terms of efficiencies that may be synthesize in productivity and inefficiency potential losses of education expenditures, whose correction demands a comprehensive design of public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Observatorio Medioambiental is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Foreign Policy Journal (CFPJ) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents a detailed review of the model of the Community Development Program for Marginalized Urban Areas ZUMAR+FIDEPO (Z+F), a social development program managed by the Ministry of Social and Human Development from the state of Guanajuato, which operates as a public trust. Based on a documentary analysis, it highlights the philosophy and vision, as well as its discourse and how development, participation and intervention has been conceptualized as the structural elements of the program. It also includes a punctual comparison with other similar projects in Chile and Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many regulations for the design-development and the manufacture of biomaterials. The Center for Governmental Control of Medical Devices is the institution that evaluates this kind of products in Cuba, to guarantee safety and efficacy in their medical use. This evaluation requires the conformity with national or international technical standards. Certification of products and quality systems are carried out by the National Office for Standardization (NOS) and requires the compliance with pertinent national standards. Both evaluation processes demand from the manufacturer to keep a quality management system, including some requirements of the ISO 9000 standards. Quality system certification involves the compliance of the manufacturer requirements to guarantee customer satisfaction and the regulatory and technical requirements. In this paper the requirements of the quality system needed for product certification and medical registration in Cuba are discussed and their relation to ISO 9001 standard. Also, the results obtained by the Center of Biomaterials of Havana University in this field are shown. Nowadays, neither product certification nor regulatory requirements for medical registration include quality system requirements in the design development process, customer focus, continuous improvement, internal quality auditing or management revision. Product certification demands the control of documents, quality assay records, including specifications, having a difference with government assessment that does not have these requirements. For the medical registration, compliance with different requirements is claimed depending on the risk classification of the medical device. More requirements are asked for the assessment of Class III medical devices. Medical registration demands the control of supplies, product traceability and validation of special processes, specially the sterilization processes. ISO 9000 quality system certification includes the compliance with quality requirements demanded by product certification and medical registration. The Center of Biomaterials has implanted a ISO 9001:2000 Quality Management System (QMS) in design- development and production that has been certified by NOS, having a solid support for medical registration of new products in the field of medical materials and for product certification. An effort has to be done by Cuban medical devices manufacturers to implant and certify their QMS and also to develop national technical standards for products assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cooperativismo y Desarrollo (COODES) is the property of Universidad de Pinar del Rio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper emphasizes the importance of favorable predisposition on the part of political tourists to the success of a country's political hospitality. Cuban and Nicaraguan political hospitality aimed essentially at the same goals and used the same techniques. The premise of these methods--personal attentiveness and selective display--is that people generalize from personal experience, hence it is desirable to make such experiences both pleasant and politically instructive. Political hospitality begins with efforts to ensure that the impressions of the visitor will not be contaminated by unauthorized contacts and experiences. The presence of the guide-interpreter is not the only obstacle to frank exchanges between natives and visitors. Controls over foreign correspondents and reporters are especially tight, and attempts to influence them predate their actual arrival. When tourists deviated from the officially arranged itineraries and activities, the authorities did not hesitate to intervene. The effectiveness of political hospitality depends greatly on the predisposition of its recipients. When favorable predisposition combines with ignorance and lack of imagination, the visitors' capacity for absorbing the messages of political hospitality greatly expands. The Nicaraguan policies of political hospitality have possibly been even more ambitious than those of Cuba--more explicit and specific in their political objectives.

Strict state policies and regulations restrict private‐sector growth in Cuba. And yet, many people (scholars and others) view Cuban entrepreneurialism as a celebrated feature of recent Cuban economic transformations. Entrepreneurship usually surges under more liberalized circumstances, where resources are more readily available or individual economic actors are given opportunities to use their flexibility to innovate new or enhanced products and services that fill market gaps. In Cuba, however, the state maintains strong control over the economy, firmly regulating access to resources and restricting the possibilities for entrepreneurial growth and ingenuity. Furthermore, entrepreneurs are often pitted against the political‐economic morals of the state. And yet, Cubans continue to enter this precarious line of work. This article explores this contradiction, asking, why do entrepreneurs choose to engage in entrepreneurship in the first place, and how might their entrepreneurial activities help them respond to barriers left by the state? I draw from ethnographic research conducted in Havana (2018–19) to argue that entrepreneurship in Cuba is driven not just in spite of but also because of restrictive government policies and regulations and that entrepreneurial strategies can be innovative and flexible forms of state resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article criticises the social policy literature for equating universalism to the universal coverage of citizens. The current so-called 'universal' social protection systems guarantee social citizen rights, while the revisited truly universalism guarantees social human rights for everyone. Crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) is used to map and track the level of exclusiveness or inclusiveness into social pensions in the existing 30 social pension programmes on 28 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. The article examines the various paths of eligibility requirements in social pensions conditioning three specific outcomes: (1) access for every older-age individual (truly universal), (2) access for every category of immigrant (no targeting by citizenship or residency) and (3) access for older-age immigrants with legal resident status (targeting by residency but not by citizenship). The research makes several contributions. First, it offers a useful inventory of the eligibility requirements for access to the 30 social pensions in LAC. Second, it proposes an analytical framework to redefine universalism after considering the migration-social policy nexus. Contrary to what the literature claims, there are no universal social pensions in the region. Third, the analysis indicates that only in two countries, Cuba and Jamaica, social pensions have immigrant-friendly targeting rules, requiring neither citizenship nor any length of residency to become a beneficiary. A total of 12 countries require citizenship and 24 of them a certain number of years of residency. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of social pensions are means tested. Finally, the csQCA allows identifying patterns of targeting mechanisms and is used to propose five exploratory regimes of inclusionary social pensions. The article calls for protected international mobility of the older-age population in the form of a truly universalistic system in which the entire aged population has the right to a social pension. Only then, countries would truly adhere to Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic reforms implemented in Cuba since 2008 do not adequately deal with the structural issues that hamper the country's economic development. The article presents a system dynamics model to investigate Cuba's development process, and a simulation analysis to compare different policy scenarios that may be realized in the future as economic reforms will continue. The results indicate that the most effective development policy would be to combine active public policies to enhance the research and development sector on the one hand, and to foster the emergence of an efficient private sector that will develop the capital infrastructure of the economy on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Colombia Internacional is the property of Universidad de los Andes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article we use a food sovereignty frame to analyze the role of the State in favoring agroecological scaling, particularly in Cuba and in the Latin American countries that elected leftist governments in the first years of the 21st century and currently face an upsurge of right-wing political forces. As with social movement participation in international governance structures, at the national level social movements face risks when they allow themselves to become absorbed in collaborations with the State in order to build public policy for taking agroecology to scale. By participating in the institutionalization of agroecology, movements become part of the established rules of the game, having to move within limits defined by a system that exists to preserve the interests of the dominant class. On the other hand, by boycotting the arena of governance, agroecological movements allow resurgent political and economic elites to grab land, territories and resources needed for agroecological food systems to ever become a global substitute for industrial agriculture. At the heart of the matter is the political character of agroecology: shall we continue betting on reform, in times of (counter) revolution? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a faculty development program for American social work academics that was organized by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) and held in Havana, Cuba, in June 2012 and repeated again in 2013. Data for this article come from the author’s experience in leading these visits. The article discusses why participants attended this program, what they learned, and how they viewed Cuban social work. It shows that participants had a positive reaction to the information they received about Cuba’s postrevolutionary, progressive, social policy. Social workers in the United States might benefit from learning about social work in Cuba, even though it may not serve as a role model for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of ergonomics was introduced in Cuba at the beginning of the 1970s. More than 40 years later, the prevailing approach to workers' health is still generally reactive rather than proactive, despite the commitment of the government to the subject. A factor influencing this issue is, generally, lack of recognition of the benefits of establishing ergonomic principles within most occupational activities. Recent progress to move occupational health practice toward a more preventive approach has been conducted, frequently with international support. The introduction of a set of Cuban standards proposing the necessity of ergonomic evaluations is an example of this progress. The main challenge for Cuban ergonomists is to transfer knowledge to occupational health practitioners in order to be in concordance with basic standards and regulations regarding ergonomics. The article offers a short description of the history of ergonomics and an overview of ergonomics practice in Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses food distribution policies in Cuba, with a focus on the role cooperatives played in Cuban agricultural practices, forms of land ownership, and models for sustainable agriculture. Topics include socialist states, President Raúl Castro, and how half of agricultural land remained fallow as a result of a dependence on inputs from the Soviet Union. Additional information is presented on Cuban food imports, colonialism and its removal of indigenous agriculture, and Marxist philosophy.

Copyright of Annals of the Association of American Geographers is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses U.S. Cold War foreign policy and U.S. citizenship among Cuba's homosexual exile community from 1978 to 1994. The author focuses on the tension between the Cold War imperative of welcoming anti-Communist exiles and the immigration policy of barring homosexuals. The author explains how homosexuals were considered "undesirables" in Cuba under the leadership of Fidel Castro, but in 1980 the Immigration and Naturalization Service regarded homosexuality as grounds for exclusion from the U.S. Cubans who entered the U.S. from Cuba's Mariel harbor are focused on.

The author discuses economic and social policies that have impacted female employment since the Cuban revolution of 1959. She suggests that stability resulting from women’s employment policies is due to the continual adaptation of those policies to fit changing conditions, which was the case with female employment in the 1960s, maternity law in the mid-1970s and with the social security law. However, she notes that new perspectives on women and gender relations have not changed patriarchal attitudes and the concept of female leadership still needs to become part of Cuban societal consciousness.

The article presents the case of The Queen (Al-Rawi and others) v. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and another (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees intervening), which was heard by the United Kingdom Court of Appeal in July 2006. The case involved the detention of three British-recognized Convention refugees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The relevant facts, legal issues, and court ruling are summarized.