Patterns of Economic Inequality in Monetary and Non-Monetary Assets in Cuba

The pursuit of social justice and equity has been being a pivotal political banner of the Cuban Revolution since the 1959, and it remains an objective declared by the government also in the current stage officially addressed to updating the Cuban development model. To this end, since the earlier day of Revolution the Cuban government has implemented policies aimed at both contrasting concentration of private property and personal incomes and guaranteeing everybody’s access to essential goods and services in some key domain: health, education, sports, social security, housing, nutrition, water, etc.. In so doing, some significant results have been effectively achieved (cfr. Mesa- Lago 2015), so much so that Cuba has been considered one of the most equal country in the world. As a consequence of the economic crisis and the 90s reforms aimed at reinserting Cuba into the international economy, economic and social inequality started to grow (cfr. e.g. Romanò and Barrera 2019). The present study aims to investigate on inequality trend in Cuba over the last decades. Inequality is a multidimensional concept. Accordingly, in order to depict the pattern of inequality in the last decades, we have applied quantitative and qualitative methodologies on the existing households/individuals surveys, MICS- * Corresponding Author address Email: sara.romano@unito.it 2Author name UNICEF, NORC datasets. MICS-UNICEF survey includes mainly information useful to measure the access to essential goods and services, while NORC survey collects information on incomes and goods owned by the Cubans. In particular, we estimate inequality level with respect to different domains and perspectives: monetary and non-monetary assets. Principal results show that level of inequality in income distribution measured by Gini index is not far from that of other developed countries (i.e. UK and Portugual). This fact coexists with an improvement in wealth distribution related to the access to essential goods and services (i.e. non-monetary assets). This improvement is due mainly to the social policies adopted by government during the 2000s. These results from Cuba are consistent with what is been occurring in other post-socialist countries as for example the China (i.e. Ward 2014).