Comment on "The Forsaken Road: Reassessing Living Standards Following the Cuban Revolution and the American Embargo" (opens in new tab)

Bastos, Geloso, and Bologna Pavlik (2026) argue that the US embargo explains less than one tenth of the difference in per capita income between Cuba and a counterfactual scenario in which the country did not follow socialist economic policies. We show that their results are driven by the use of an elasticity of income to trade openness that is neither representative nor a reasonable upper bound of the values found in the literature and by their ...