The social and economic transformations undertaken by the Cuban Revolution since 1959 involved the implementation of a development strategy that harmonizes economic growth with social policies which, in terms of employment, have been aimed, since the beginning, at providing paid jobs to all citizens fit for work and at eliminating the high unemployment and underemployment rates inherited from the neocolonial regimes that preceded the Revolution.

The disappearance of unemployment took place very rapidly. If in 1958 the island’s unemployment rate was 24%, in 1970, after the Population and Housing Census, the figure had decreased to 1.3%, thus giving the country the status of full employment. This percentage remained the same until the 1980’s, when there was a 3.4% annual average increase.

With the collapse of the socialist bloc and, particularly, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, along with the strengthening of the blockade imposed by the United States on Cuba for more than four decades now, the country’s economy received a heavy blow, to such extent that, between 1989 and 1993, there was a 35% decrease in the Gross Internal Product.