If only the Cuban revolution had taken a different course, following the champion for independence Jose Marti. Here’s why Cuba could have been a model of economic progress…

Jose Marti and the Future of Cuba as it Might Have Been

by Ed Dodson & Michael Hudson
Forum sponsored by the International Union for Land Value Taxation
7 August 2020

“Few people outside of Cuba know that the Cuban people had a champion for their independence long before Fidel Castro. This champion was the poet and revolutionary leader Jose Marti who spent most of his life outside of Cuba, teaching, writing, and organizing. Part of that time he lived and worked in the United States, where in the late nineteenth century he came to embrace the principles embraced by [19th Century political economist] Henry George.

…. Jose Marti, in one of his essays (reprinted in Vol. 22 of his Collected Works in the Havana 1966 edition, p. 124), endorsed this tax as put forth by his fellow New York City journalist Henry George. Marti wrote that “reform of the actual conditions of labour, transformation of land into public property and conversion of all types of taxes into a single tax on occupied land, is a doctrine that has not been well received by the powerful corporations that today control virtually all the productive wealth, or by that part of the Catholic clergy that lives close to the rich, and with their support.”

This is precisely our message: a rent-tax on land, natural resources, and monopoly earnings, as calculated before payment of interest, insurance, and other parasitic non-production charges.

This tax is legal, as long as it affects domestic and international investors equally. It will recapture for the public sector the rent – the free lunch, and hence the capital gains – that the privatizers thought they had stolen, fair and square, and irreversibly. This recapture of the flow of rent and monopoly earnings, the income created by social progress, and the public domain, is so large that governments need not tax labour or even industry.