Regino Boti León

Cuban economist, known for his work in the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), and for his participation in the initial economic strategy of the Cuban Revolution.

He was born in the city of Guantánamo. He was the son of the renowned poet Regino Boti Barreiro.

He graduated as a Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Havana with brilliant results, but never practiced that specialty.

Immediately afterward, he completed a Master's degree in Economics at the prestigious Harvard University, and he dedicated his entire life to this science. Among his Harvard professors were Wassily Leontief, Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 1973; Joseph Schumpeter, author of a renowned and encyclopedic work on economic cycles; Gottfried Haberler, author of a classical text on international trade; Abbot P. Usher, economic historian; Bartley Crum, author of a mathematics book for economists, and Alvin Hansen, a disciple of Keynes.

He began his career as an economist at CEPAL, between the years 1948 and 1956, in Chile and Brazil. As a founder of that organization, he joined an important group of Latin American researchers—led by Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch—who have gone down in the history of economic thought as structuralists or cepalistas for the orientation of their analyses and their concrete proposals for economic transformations for the underdeveloped world, which this economic school called the periphery, in contrast to the industrialized metropolises, which it called the center.

This Latin Americanist approach to the need for economic changes both internally and in international relations had in Boti one of its pillars.

His early work in the international economic sphere did not, however, distance him from his country. In 1956 he returned to Cuba and joined the University of Oriente, where he founded the first School of Economics in Cuba.

At that institution, he worked to ensure that students received solid theoretical training, broad mastery of mathematics and statistics, proper management of accounting principles, and particularly the study of economic history and the problems of capital accumulation and underdevelopment.

During his time at the University of Oriente, he made a visit to Fidel Castro in Mexico to express the solidarity of numerous professors. The Cuban leader communicated to him, then, some of the economic measures that would be adopted upon the revolution's triumph.

Due to his political convictions and his confrontation with the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, in 1958 he was forced to emigrate to Chile, and he returned to CEPAL. The University of Chile made him an honorary member of the Faculty of Economic Sciences.

With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he returned to the Island and was appointed head of Research at the National Bank of Cuba (BNC).
The University of Oriente appointed him president of the Board of Professors Evaluators of the Faculty of Economic and Commercial Sciences.

Due to his intellectual prestige and recognized leadership, Boti was the vice president of the Executive Commission in charge of the University Reform carried out in 1962. That Commission was presided over by Dr. Armando Hart Dávalos, and among its members the presence of Dr. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez stood out.

In 1960 the Central Planning Board (JUCEPLAN) was created, with functions similar to those of a ministry of economy, of which Boti was the first minister-president. He held that responsibility until mid-1964, a period in which the first economic strategies of the Cuban Revolution were developed.

Subsequently, he assumed various responsibilities in different branches of the economy.

In 1995, he was elected a member of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country (SEAP). In the last years of his life he was vice president of the CIMEX Corporation and, until his sudden death in 1999, advisor to the presidency of that entity and of the National Association of Economists and Accountants of Cuba (ANEC).

In 1998 he received the National Prize in Economics in its first edition, being the first economist awarded with that relevant recognition.

Starting in 1965, he made important concrete proposals in different branches of the Cuban economy, characterized—like all of his work—by the rigor and projection of his thinking.

In his papers there is preserved a collection of unpublished works on topics that remain completely current: "The Soybean Explores New Territories" (1967), "Study on the Minimization and Total Cost in Convertible Dollars of Poultry Feed Production Through the Application of a Mathematical Model of Linear Programming" (1968), "Distribution by Destinations of Agricultural Production of Citrus" (1976), "Considerations Regarding the Capitalist Market for Biotechnological Medicines and the Possibilities for Exporting Products" and "Considerations on the Development of International Telecommunications in the Immediate Future" (both from 1993), "Free Trade Zones. The Experience of Latin America and the Caribbean" (1996), "Securitization and the Issuance and Sale of Securities or Securities Titles" and "Cuban Counterpoint of Soy and Sunflower as Potential Sources of Edible Oil and Flour with High Protein Content" (both from 1997).