After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism

Cuba's economy, strangled by foreign debt, is overdependent on sugar exports of declining value. Increasing waste and muddle of the bureaucracy, growing inequality between workers' and managers' wages, high absenteeism and greater rationing of basic goods all point to a severe crisis in Cuba's socialist experiment, according to French leftist Habel. Her prescription for change includes political democracy, freedom of speech and action, granting of decision-making power to workers and letting ``the whole of society take control of its own development.'' Habel, who has visited Cuba regularly since 1962, writes as a disillusioned follower of Castro's revolution, which makes her heavily footnoted tract dull and plodding, at times an apologia. Chapters cover Cuba's militant foreign policy, the government's alleged involvement in drug trafficking and its strained relations with Gorbachev, who refused to cancel Cuba's debt. (Sept.)