This paper argues that the household has become a renewed space of significance for Cuban women in the post-Soviet period. It draws from existing scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the city of Santiago de Cuba to discuss the effect of post-Soviet crisis and reform upon women's domestic practices, the management of domestic economies, and longstanding gender ideals that link women to the domestic sphere. Physical, economic and social factors leading to post-Soviet Cuban women's increased concentration upon the household are argued to be both the result of pre-existing social orientations towards households as a womanly space and a response to specific politico-economic shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This essay examines three recent historical approaches to the political economy of Latin America's relative economic backwardness. All three locate the origins of contemporary underdevelopment in defective colonial institutions linked to inequality. The contrasting view offered here affirms the significance of institutional constraints, but argues that they did not arise from colonial inequalities, but from the adaptation of Iberian practices to the American colonies under conditions of imperial weakness. Colonial inequality varied across the Americas; while it was not correlated with colonial economic performance, it mattered because it determined the extent of elite resistance to institutional modernisation after independence. The onset of economic growth in the mid to late nineteenth century brought economic elites to political power, but excluding majorities as inequality increased restrained the region's twentieth-century growth rates and prevented convergence.

This article attempts to analyse the nature of Cuban policymaking during the period of economic ‘adjustment’ since the collapse of the Soviet bloc by focusing on one aspect: the opening to foreign capital. It outlines the widely-accepted characterisation of policy as a cyclical process and identifies the assumptions about the policy-making process that underlie it. Citing data on the changes in economic conditions and the sequencing of policy towards foreign capital in the post-1990 period, it suggests that policy-making can be better understood as an evolutionary process. This conclusion has implications for the way in which we understand the renewed wave of reforms launched in March 2008.