Ricardo Torres

Ricardo Torres is the Cuban economist interviewed in Dark times for Cuba’s economic experiment. The Planet Money episode identifies him as an economist at American University in Washington, D.C. who left Cuba almost five years before the episode and uses him to explain why the current crisis is an intensification of long-building structural problems.

Torres supplies the episode’s analytical bridge between Yaser Gonzalez Cabrera’s daily stress and Cuba’s larger model. He frames Cuba’s history as a movement between External Patron Dependence and selective Constrained Market Reform, with the Soviet Union, Venezuela, tourism, and the United States all shaping what the Cuban state could afford to promise.

Source Position

• Torres says Soviet support let poverty coexist with coverage for shelter, food, education, and health care.
• He presents the Special Period as both economic collapse and ideological betrayal for many Cubans who still believed socialism could work.
• He argues that private-sector expansion remained constrained because the Cuban state wanted markets to complement, not overtake, the state sector.
• In the conclusion, he says Cuba’s way out requires negotiation with the United States because domestic dysfunction and U.S. pressure are both binding constraints.

Connections

• Cuba, Havana, and Yaser Gonzalez Cabrera - country, city, and personal crisis context.
• Cuban Dual Economic Strategy, External Patron Dependence, and Constrained Market Reform - main historical frame he supports.
• Oil Dependency Blackout Risk and Tourism-Dependent Small Economy - current vulnerabilities his analysis helps explain.