Re: GLOBAL KEYNESIANISM

At 09:06 AM 4/28/2000 +0300, you wrote:
>Cuba and Argentina were not comparable.  Up to 1940, Argentina was 
>something
>like the world's 7th largest economy and on the cusp of entering the "1st
>world." 

I had thought that Argentina at that point _was_ a First World country, with
a standard of living roughly comparable to that of western Europe. The
decline in Argentine living standards relative to western Europe seems to
have begun in the Great Depression.

>Cuba was well off by Caribbean standards, although with horrible
>inequalities and poverty, but was no Argentina.  Argentina was 
>industrialized
>and well developed generally, Cuba was merely a client state of the US that
>exported sugar....

True enough. Cuba did have severe structural problems, and the Castro regime
did eliminate many of these. The question is whether or not Castro was the
only way to go for Cuba, and whether Cuba might not have achieved better
results while working within the framework of the capitalist world-econony.
How precisely was Cuba different from other First and Second World countries
that depended mainly upon the exports of raw materials to a metropolitan
industrial state?

>Best,
>
>Jeff Sommers

By the way, nice SIG. Believe it or not, I agree with it fully. :-)