Pitt’s Unexpected Stature in Latin America

Carmelo Mesa-Lago

Pitt hosts one of the most prominent Latin American studies programs in the United States. For several decades, graduate students from all over Latin America have studied at Pitt and returned home to work in academia, government, and business. 

The stature of the Center for Latin American Studies is in large part due to the work of Carmelo Mesa-Lago, who directed the center from 1974 to 1986, after he began as assistant director in 1967. One of the world’s leading scholars of Cuba (he appears regularly in global Spanish-language media and conferences), Mesa-Lago is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics and Latin American Studies at Pitt.

“Being director of the Center for Latin American Studies was one of the most important things in my life,” Mesa-Lago says. “We developed a program that is among the best in the world.”

Mesa-Lago describes his main field as social security—meaning how a society provides its people with health care, pensions, unemployment aid, and social assistance. He is especially known for his work on the adverse impact of pension privatization in Latin America.

Now 89, Mesa-Lago just finished what he describes as his most controversial book—a comparison of the economies of China, Vietnam, and Cuba. He documents the sad state of the Cuban economy and compares Cuba with two countries that improved their economies and lives of their people while the Communist Party remained firmly in control.

Frustration accompanies working on Cuba for 65 years. “The economic crisis in Cuba now is worse than after the end of aid from the Soviet Union in the 1990s,” he says. “At the time of the revolution in 1959, Cuba was the second- or third-most developed country in Latin America. Ninety-five percent of the Cuban population supported the revolution and there was international good will to help Fidel Castro make Cuba the most economically and socially advanced society in Latin America. Now the advances of the revolution are destroyed.”

Mesa-Lago has been criticized by both opponents and supporters of the Communist government. In 2007, he shared an award from the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, with former South African President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela. As Mesa-Lago began his speech, the Cuban delegation walked out of the room.

“But then people in Miami call me a Communist. I think that is the political price of objectivity.” He stresses that he is not a counter-revolutionary. “The revolution and the counter-revolution are now two competing fantasies.”