On 1 August 2010 Cuban President Raúl Castro announced significant economic reforms which have the potential to energise the country’s moribund economy. Encouraging the downsizing of the state and the growth of a non state sector contains the danger that, in retrospect, these August Announcements will be seen as the beginning of a full-scale transition to a market economy that will challenge the socialist character of Cuban society. How this will play out remains to be seen, however, the August Announcements have elements that appeal to Cuban youth who express a great deal of worry about an uncertain future as they demonstrate support for the principles and the accomplishments of the revolution as they imagine it. At the same time, they have modest aspirations about their professional and economic well-being which many feared they could not achieve in Cuba. Will these announcements and the measures that will flow from the 6th Party Congress meet the political and socio-economic aspirations of Cuban youth? Based on interviews conducted recently in Cuba, the author argues that the August announcements contain both the potential to energise the socialist economy and strengthen the legitimacy of the Communist Party while also representing a risk to socialism and to the Party’s legitimacy as well – a risk the authorities could not postpone any longer.
 

The tortured 50-year relationship between the revolutionary government of Cuba and the United States has been the focal point of much political and scholarly analysis over a long number of years. The key question that is often asked is: when will the two countries have ‘normal’ relations? Unfortunately, that framing of the question is problematic and not particularly useful in addressing the fundamental issues that separate the governments of the two countries. The reality is that Cuba and the United States, going back over 200 years, have never had a ‘normal’ relationship, defined as mutual respect for the sovereignty and national interests of each other. For 50 years the government of the United States has sought the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Cuba by any means necessary. In the 1960s that meant an invasion of exiles at Playa Giron and numerous attempts to assassinate Cuban leaders. In the decade of the 2000s, in addition to the 50-year economic blockade, there are the programmes of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) designed to support a small US-aligned political opposition embodied in the recent case of Alan Gross.
 

This article presents a discourse analysis of ‘race’ and ‘otherness’ in press editorials published in Cuban newspapers during specific periods of the twentieth century. It analyses the discursive strategies used by newspapers to construct and legitimise their idea of national identity, especially with reference to argumentation and the representation of social agents. The corpus used for this study consists of editorials from Diario de la Marina for the first half of the century (1902, 1912, 1939–40) and the national edition of Granma for the revolutionary periods (1975–76, 1998–99). The article also examines how discursive strategies, and the idea of national identity they construct, changed over the course of the century. Finally, it will review the extent to which the conclusions of this analysis intersect with those from other studies in the fields of history or literature.
 

Operation Miracle is an international Cuban public health campaign that seeks to restore vision to 6 million people in the underdeveloped and developing world by 2016. Beginning in 2004, it has grown considerably and today Cuban doctors have provided over 2 million vision restoration operations (at no cost to patients) in some 60 ophthalmological screening centres in 35 countries. Moreover, this programme has been successful outside the traditional boundaries of western development ideals (including the concept of development as a linear process and the need for societal wealth before health). These ‘classic’ ideals are routinely used in development practice, but they are highly rigid and limiting. Operation Miracle, by contrast, has followed no conceivable classic model, nor has it employed any typical development rationale – yet it has been particularly successful. This article will use the case study of Operation Miracle to highlight the overall limiting and restrictive nature of classic development ideology.