This accessible, up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to modern Cuba provides an overview of Cuban history with particular emphasis on the country's post-Soviet economic collapse, the measures that President Castro's government took in response, and their ensuing results and impact.

This book neither paints Cuba as a perfect society nor universal model for Third World development. But it does argue that Cuba demonstrates that even relatively small countries can pursue a path of economic and social development that avoids the problems endemic in the rest of Latin America. The author also argues that the country's political stability is not merely the result of authoritarianism, but that important elements of democracy involve participation and help generate public support.

Cuba today continues to have huge problems, but the wider significance of the Cuban Revolution rests on its practical demonstration that it is possible to pursue radical and humane development policies which are at complete variance with the increasingly criticised nostrums of neoliberal economics being foisted on the rest of the world.