Facing the global financial crisis, Cuba has been obliged to reform its socio-economic system in order to preserve its social model. The serious difficulties which confronted the island are explained both by external factors (mainly the sanctions imposed by the United States, the global systemic crisis and natural disasters) and by internal factors (the bureaucracy, corruption, low productivity, hypertrophy of the public sector and the lack of a culture of debate, among others). This article examines the proposed causes and prospects for the reform of the economic model presented at the 7th meeting of the Cuban Communist Party Congress and adopted by the Cuban Parliament in August 2011, after major changes resulting from a widespread popular debate.

 The Centro Memorial Dr Martin Luther King Jr is a well-known, but rarely examined non-governmental organisation in Havana, Cuba. It seeks to go well beyond Paulo Freire’s intent of empowering the powerless through popular education methodology by employing it to transform Cuban civil society into a Gramscian socialist civil society. This article examines the introduction of Gramsci’s ideas about civil society to Cuba during the ‘Special Period’ and how they were appropriated and acclimated to the Cuban reality, though not without strong and continuing contention. It shows how, in the face of competing approaches to civil society – by the US government and the Cuban state – the Centre offers an alternative vision based on Gramscian civil society theory and popular education methodology creating a dynamic locus for change in Cuban contemporary society.

 Since 1969, more than one hundred organisations in the United States have been attempting to change US Cuba policy. Collectively, they constitute a dynamic social movement clamouring for change on family, tourist, cultural and academic travel, remittances and trade to Cuba. This article attempts to explain why this movement, identified as the ‘anti-embargo movement’, has persisted in attempting to change US Cuba policy for decades although it has met with such limited success over time. A social movements theoretical framework is employed to analyse the persistence of the movement and to explain the impetus accounting for its sustained activism in the post-Cold War era. Drawing on the popular resource mobilisation literature, the article contends that the rational, utilitarian model is inadequate to understand the multifarious attributes of the movement. Therefore, it turns to alternative social movements perspectives such as tactical frames, solidarity networks and co-option, for possible answers.

 Cuba sought international help in the 1960s from individuals, organisations, and countries that were sympathetic to the revolution in response to acts of aggression by the US government. We discuss the experiences of one such group of individuals, North Americans from Canada and the United States, who travelled to Cuba in the 1960s to live and work there. We show that the revolution benefited from their support in practical and symbolic ways. It politically socialised North Americans and imbued them with a revolutionary enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was tempered over time by recognition of the revolution’s limitations. The story of these North Americans offers an insider perspective on the revolution in its early humanist phase and furthers an understanding of the New Left’s views on Cuba in the 1960s. Data come from 28 qualitative interviews with North Americans who lived and worked in Cuba in the 1960s.

 ‘Quackery’, ‘charlatanism’, ‘hocus pocus’ or more simply, ‘fraud’; natural and traditional medicine has long been subject to disparaging judgements from the annals of Western medicine (Manewtiz 2001). Despite this however, one country securely anchored within the paradigm of Western, empirically-based medicine and in possession of superior health indicators, continues to employ these controversial methodologies; this country is Cuba (MEDICC 2011; WHO 2008). Cuba is a world leader in the integration of natural and traditional medicine (NTM) into its conventional practices and this essay sets out to examine this anomaly (Bancroft-Hinchey 2010). This article begins with a clarification of the term NTM, and examples of its multiple modalities. It then attends to the factors that precipitated the rise of NTM in Cuba initially, underscoring the economic necessity of its adoption. It then examines its proliferation and the manner in which it has been integrated into mainstream medical practice. Before concluding, the article examines the rationale behind NTM’s continued use, considers its scientific basis and whether there are factors other than economic savings that necessitate its inclusion within the Cuban healthcare system. To conclude, the article confronts the question: should Cuba’s healthcare system abandon the integration of natural and traditional medicine or does it truly have something to offer?