My friend and Carleton University colleague Arch Ritter has just started a new blog "The Cuban Economy/La Economia Cubana". He currently has three posts: one on Cuban real wages and GDP (why have real wages recovered little from the 90% decline in the early 1990's, while reported GDP has recovered fully); a second on a new technology that will reduce the demand for Cuba's nickel exports; and a third on the likely effect of lifting US travel restrictions to Cuba.

I have a passing amateur interest in the Cuban economy; Arch has a serious professional interest. He has been visiting Cuba, and researching the Cuban economy, for several decades. It was Arch who set up Carleton's MA Economics program in Havana (jointly with the University of Havana), that led to me (and Frances Woolley) teaching in Havana several times in the late 1990's.

Even those of us who are not specifically interested in Cuba might want to take a glance. We can model economics as the attempt to estimate the parameters B in a regression Y=BX+e. If X has a very small variance in your sample it is hard to get a good estimate of B. By including countries like Cuba, that differ considerably from the countries you are already looking at, you greatly increase the range of variation of your sample, and get a better chance of seeing how all economies work.

To say the same thing a different way, thinking about the Cuban economy broadened my own outlook in economics. For example, I got to see an economy where all goods were in excess demand, and see the Barro-Grossman supply-side multiplier in action (people don't want to work, because they cannot spend their extra wages, which leads to even fewer goods being produced…). I got to see an economy with different monies circulating, with one-way convertibility between them.