Sociolismo ("partner-ism"), also known as amiguismo ("friend-ism"), is the informal term used in Cuba to describe the reciprocal exchange of favors by individuals, usually relating to circumventing bureaucratic restrictions or obtaining hard-to-find goods.
It comes from the Spanish word socio which means business partner or buddy, and is a pun on the official government policy of socialismo (socialism). It is analogous to the blat of the Soviet Union or the term combina in Israel. [1] It is a form of corruption in Cuba. [2]
The term is particularly associated with the black market economy, and perceived cronyism in Cuba's state controlled command economy. Socios can be black market operators who "facilitate" (steal) goods that are officially reserved for the state. They can also get someone a job or obtain paperwork.
The system is used by anyone who needs to send an e-mail or print a resume but does not have a computer, or needs paint or cement but has no access to an Office Store or Home Improvement Store. Gary Marx, [3] the Chicago Tribune's Havana correspondent, reports the system works this way: Cubans send out signals they need something, make telephone calls and visit neighbors and friends to find the right person who can get things in motion.
Few people own cars and the buses, or camellos , are slow and overcrowded; many Cubans spend hours each day arranging rides to get to work, school or accomplish a task. [3] People often must reach out and secure what they need por fuera ("through the outside") or por la izquierda ("through the left"), slang terms that mean "outside the official system".
The system has different levels and obligations. Friends, neighbors and relatives do favors for each other without expecting anything in return. But with lesser-known acquaintances, exchange is more normal for such things as shampoo, a piece of chicken, fruit, or cash. [3]
Sometimes the favors extend to hundreds of people. Employees of a state company in Pinar del Río were given special treatment at a local hospital in exchange for paper, pens and other scarce materials and services. [3]
"Sociolismo" lets any person with control over some resource exchange access to the resource for some current or future personal material benefit. Complex networks of reciprocal obligations thus became an important part of the functioning of the Cuban economy.
Daily life involves maintaining the personal relationships necessary to ensure access to necessary goods and services, through unofficial channels, or through official channels but by unofficial means. Though the term became prominent during the economic downturn known as the Special Period in Cuba, usage has continued into the mid-2000s. [4]
Aspects of Cuban sociolismo were exported to the United States via Cuban immigrants, who relied on friends and relatives in their new country for help in finding jobs, since they were not able to verify their skills or employment in Cuba. This was particularly prevalent in the largest Cuban-American community, in Florida. [5]
In trade, barter is a system of exchange in which participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. Economists distinguish barter from gift economies in many ways; barter, for example, features immediate reciprocal exchange, not one delayed in time. Barter usually takes place on a bilateral basis, but may be multilateral. In most developed countries, barter usually exists parallel to monetary systems only to a very limited extent. Market actors use barter as a replacement for money as the method of exchange in times of monetary crisis, such as when currency becomes unstable or simply unavailable for conducting commerce.
Guanxi is a term used in Chinese culture to describe an individual's social network of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships. The character guan, 关, means “closed” while the character xi 系 means “system” and together the term refers to a closed system of relationships that is somewhat analogous to the term old boy's network in the West. In Western media, the pinyin romanization guanxi is more widely used than common translations such as "connections" or "relationships" because those terms don't capture the significance of a person's guanxi to most personal and business dealings in China. Unlike in the West, guanxi relationships are almost never established purely through formal meetings but must also include spending time to get to know each other during tea sessions, dinner banquets, or other personal meetings. Essentially, guanxi requires a personal bond before any business relationship can develop. As a result, guanxi relationships are often more tightly bound than relationships in Western personal social networks. Guanxi has a major influence on the management of businesses based in Mainland China and businesses owned by Overseas Chinese people in Southeast Asia.
In cultural anthropology, reciprocity refers to the non-market exchange of goods or labour ranging from direct barter to forms of gift exchange where a return is eventually expected as in the exchange of birthday gifts. It is thus distinct from the true gift, where no return is expected.
The convertible peso was one of two official currencies in Cuba, the other being the Cuban peso. It had been in limited use since 1994, when its value was pegged 1:1 to the United States dollar.
The law of the value of commodities, known simply as the law of value, is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with reference to David Ricardo's economics. Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work, namely that the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labor-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them within the capitalist mode of production.
An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services by different agents. In general, it is defined 'as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the production, use, and management of scarce resources'. A given economy is a set of processes that involves its culture, values, education, technological evolution, history, social organization, political structure and legal systems, as well as its geography, natural resource endowment, and ecology, as main factors. These factors give context, content, and set the conditions and parameters in which an economy functions. In other words, the economic domain is a social domain of interrelated human practices and transactions that does not stand alone.
In Russian, blat is a form of corruption, which is a system of informal agreements, exchanges of services, connections, Party contacts, or black market deals to achieve results or get ahead.
Match fixing in Romanian football is called blat.
"Gifting remittances" describes a range of scholarly approaches relating remittances to anthropological literature on gift giving. The terms draws on Lisa Cliggett's "gift remitting", but is used to describe a wider body of work. Broadly speaking, remittances are the money, goods, services, and knowledge that migrants send back to their home communities or families. Remittances are typically considered as the economic transactions from migrants to those at home. While remittances are also a subject of international development and policy debate and sociological and economic literature, this article focuses on ties with literature on gifting and reciprocity or gift economy founded largely in the work of Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins. While this entry focuses on remittances of money or goods, remittances also take the form of ideas and knowledge. For more on these, see Peggy Levitt's work on "social remittances" which she defines as "the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending country communities."
The social norm of reciprocity is the expectation that people will respond to each other in similar ways—responding to gifts and kindnesses from others with similar benevolence of their own, and responding to harmful, hurtful acts from others with either indifference or some form of retaliation. Such norms can be crude and mechanical, such as a literal reading of the eye-for-an-eye rule lex talionis, or they can be complex and sophisticated, such as a subtle understanding of how anonymous donations to an international organization can be a form of reciprocity for the receipt of very personal benefits, such as the love of a parent.
Cuba has suffered from widespread and rampant corruption since the establishment of the Republic of Cuba in 1902. The book Corruption in Cuba states that public ownership resulted in "a lack of identifiable ownership and widespread misuse and theft of state resources... when given opportunity, few citizens hesitate to steal from the government." Furthermore, the complex relationship between governmental and economic institutions makes them especially "prone to corruption."
The value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. Marx's account of the value-form is differently adopted in later forms Marxism, in the Frankfurt School and in post-Marxism. When social labor is split up into independent enterprises and organized capitalistically, its products take the form of an ensemble of commodities of diverse types, which face one another on the market.
Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.
A Tanda is the Latin American term for an informal rotating savings and credit association (ROSCAS). They are operated globally, but have over 200 different names that vary from country to country. This economic activity is practiced among various groups of people which are also known as cundinas (Mexico), susu/Osusu, hui (Asia), juntas (Peru), cuchubales, pollas (Chile), arisan (Indonesia), main kutu (Malaysia), pandeiros (Brazil), paluwagan (Philippines), Stokvel, committee or quiniela. An English name for such an association is a partnerhand. In short, a tanda is a form of a short-term no-interest loan among a group of friends and family.
A moneyless economy or non-monetary economy is a system for the allocation of goods and services as well as for the assignment of work without payment of money. The simplest example is the family household, which can be a system of obligations nevertheless.
Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism and in Das Kapital. It is first explicitly used in Marx's published book The Poverty of Philosophy, although Marx and Engels had already defined the term in The German Ideology.
Alena Valeryevna Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL). She is known for her studies of blat, corruption and informal practices in Russia.
The second economy in the Soviet Union was black market or the informal sector in the economy of the Soviet Union. The term was suggested by Gregory Grossman in his seminal article, "The Second Economy of the USSR" (1977). Economist Gerard Roland noted that as Grossman anticipated, "the logic of the second economy tended over time to undermine the logic of the command system and to lead to expanding black markets". This prediction was corroborated by the long-term analysis of the economies of Russia and Ukraine (1965–1989) by Treml and Alexeev. To a varying degree, the second economy influenced all Eastern Bloc economies.
Mayfair Yang or Yang Meihui is a Taiwanese-American cultural anthropologist of China. Her research focuses on modernity, religion and secularism, state formation, religious environmentalism, China Studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and media studies.
Cuba-Dominican Republic relations refers to the bilateral relations between The Dominican Republic and the Republic of Cuba. The Dominican Republic has a Embassy in Havana and Cuba has a Embassy in Santo Domingo.
 Cuba topics | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
