This book is the product of collaborations between Cuban and European social scientists. Without ignoring the devastating impact of the US embargo, it shows that Cubas grave economic impasse is endogenously rooted in the contradictions of its peculiar version of state socialism. These contradictions led to a strongly idealistic and egalitarian bias in economic and social policies, implying a severe underestimation of the objective constraints imposed by the relevance of the law of value in the domain of social relations of production and exchange. Two of their most severe manifestations of the crisis of Cubas traditional state socialist model are the parlous state of the agricultural sector and the emergence of multiple and novel forms of income inequality.