A special period?

Patrick Pietroni reflects on the future of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba.

In 1988 Cuba's economy was undermined overnight by the collapse of the USSR: GDP was reduced by 80% and the sweetness of the sugar industry, Cuba's major export to the Soviet bloc, became instead a bitter pill. Over the next decade, food rationing, lack of transport, electricity blackouts and much misery was experienced by the Cuban population. As the economy was gradually turned around, the once restricted tourist industry was encouraged and the US dollar permitted as a parallel currency. Now twenty years later, Cuba's economy - although still hindered by the US blockade - has recovered and is growing despite the 'credit crunch' and the collapsing economies of many of the world's leading financial institutions.

Without wishing to draw too fine a parallel, the International Institute for the Study of Cuba, whose base is at the London Metropolitan University, is facing its own special period. London Metropolitan University has been audited by HEFCE (the UK's Higher Education Funding Council) and is left a £60 million deficit, which has to be paid back over the next five years: 25% of academic staff face redundancy and the university is no longer able to provide support for the Institute. We have been given three months notice to close what has become of very successful and rapidly growing academic unit.

Needless to say we are exploring several different options and are approaching other institutions as well as the EU in order to be able to relocate our academic base. Unfortunately this blow has come at a time when we were preparing to launch our Master programme, run a summer school and hold a major international conference. We have had four PhD applications to consider this year and in discussion have drafted large research applications for two of these. Our own economic forecast was that we would be self-financing within two years.

Nobody will go without food or shelter and the buses in East London will continue to run, but all our staff will face redundancy if we are unable to survive our own special period. However, we recognise that external threats have the potential for encouraging many of the best qualities in people and certainly the history of the special period in Cuba offers much to be admired and replicated.

Finally, we are ensuring that whatever the fate of the Institute will turn out to be, the journal will continue to provide an avenue for all academics to interrogate, analyse and describe the next stage of Cuba's evolution, as the Obama presidency unfolds and no doubt bring its own effects on the Cuban social experience.

Professor Patrick Pietroni is Executive Director of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Cuban Studies.


Copyright

Copyright for this work is held jointly between Patrick Pietroni and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

IJCS Volume 2 Issue 1 June 2009