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Throughout more than fifty years, the Cuban Revolution has been unable to implement an Economic Management System (EMS) to face and overcome the traditional problems of centrally planned economies. When Cuban leaders tried to back away from the planning methods adopted in socialist countries, the economic management suffered from 'voluntarism', with invariably negative consequences. This article proposes a categorization of the economic cycle into upward phases-in which rational economic planning and organization predominate-and downward phases with a highly centralized direction of the economy. A historic-economic analysis of each phase of the cycle is presented, revealing that upward phases were characterized by good or acceptable economic outcomes, while these were poor during downward phases with a prevalence of voluntarism, unless external factors appeared. Adapted from the source document.