Vtyjkyuk

Cuba and Venezuela seem to share a lot in common. Both are effectively Socialist dictatorships. Cuba's government has been Communist for many years, while Venezuela has been socialist for much less.

I would like to know why Venezuela's socialist economy has failed so catastrophically, while Cuba's has endured for so long? Both nations have governments which own the largest corporations, subsidise food, and limit private enterprise. It seems like these reasons cannot explain the disparity.

The reason Venezuela's economy collapsed was its over-reliance on oil exports. In the last half of the 20th century, the Venezuelan economy focused on growing its oil industry, while relying on imports for most other products. This worked quite well while the oil prices were exceptionally high.

It stopped working in 2014 when the global oil price plummeted and the oil industry was no longer generating enough revenue to maintain the imports of critical goods from abroad. This chart shows you the imports and exports of Venezuela over the years (there is a huge gap between 2013 and 2016, but you can see two dots at the right edge which show you the numbers from 2016). Exports went down from 144B to just 26.6B and in turn imports were reduced from 44.5B to 15.1B (in US$).

See the Wikipedia article on the economic crisis in Venezuela for details.

Cuba did suffer a similar crisis in the 90s, which was caused by the dissolution of the Soviet Union which back then was Cuba's main trade partner. Cuba responded with diversifying their import and export sources and by becoming more self-sufficient in the agrarian sector. Today's Cuba does not suffer from an over-reliance on any one product like Venezuela does. Well, the Cuban sugar industry is important, but not as important as the oil industry is for Venezuela.

Wait up a minute. Who says Cuba didn't fail spectacularly?

Miami (and Florida in general) have a huge Cuban population. Generally, because Cubans did anything they could to leave that country during the 90's - even to the extent of risking their lives trying to boat/raft/etc their way up north.

Here is the story of a person who grew up in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. There aren't any pets in Venezeula because starving people have killed them for food. Well, that happened in Cuba as well.

This story is a bit less depressing. Basically, Cuba imposed price controls on food, and all of a sudden, the people had less to eat and started losing weight. Funnily, the newspaper presents it as, "Hey, everyone got to go on a diet, and got healthier!" even though it admits the people themselves hated it and thought of it as a crisis.

(Other stores I found have details about the zoo being raided so that the animals could be eaten; I hadn't realized that the same zoo-raids that have plagued Venezuela also occurred in Cuba.)

Anyway, the issue is largely one of price controls. Basically, when someone in power says, "Product X is too expensive; from now on, it will only cost Y!" what they're really saying is "If you make product X, you're no longer going to be able to sell it for a price that covers your expenses and your cost of living!" - which understandably leads to shortages on Product X since people that produce it stop doing so. Venezeula has very good farmland - yet they can't farm. Why? Because between trying to obtain/purchase supplies, and dealing with corruption at all levels, they're not going to make enough money with the sale of their crops.

Both Cuba and Venezuela tried to deal with the issue of 'food prices are high' by imposing price controls. Which spiraled into shortages. It's not that Cuba didn't fail - it's just that it's had time to try to recover a bit from what happened in the 90's.

Venezuela made a headlong rush into state ownership of businesses, at the direction of Chavez and Maduro. Consequently, the businesses saw their experienced executives replaced by friends of Chavez and Maduro, with more of an eye on loyalty than competence.

As a direct result of this displacement of experienced people, not only was Venezuela hurt badly by the decrease of oil revenues, it also wrecked its economic infrastructure by disrupting formerly well run businesses. It wasn't a turn to socialism/communism that wrecked Venezuela's economy. It was sheer incompetence on the part of Chavez and Maduro.

Cuba's government has functioned in its current form for decades, and has established some meritocracy in its staff. While the Castros ran Cuba, they did make some effort to insure competence on the part of party officials.

This is essentially a replay of the Zimbabwe situation: Mugabe nationalized all of the farms, and redistributed the land to his friends... who couldn't run a farm. Consequently, Zimbabwe's farm output dropped dramatically, cutting off their chief export: food. Like Venezuela, Zimbabwe wasn't done in by an economic model, but the stupidity of the people in charge.

One of the problems with a dictator or near dictator is - no sanity checks on their decisions.

In a twist of irony, Venezuela's confiscation of foreign owned businesses actually helped out some of the foreign companies. GM had an auto plant in Venezuela that not only wasn't profitable, it had accrued a huge pension liability in excess of the value of the plant. When Maduro nationalized that plant, he also assumed responsibility for that pension liability. Surprise!

Lots of economy is about trade. If someone (external) can punish you by means of affecting your trade you will likely have a bad time regardless of what internal politics or reforms you push through. For whatever reason the global market for oil changed - to which Venezuela was sensitive. It would have been sensitive to that also if it was a democracy or whatever it was.