In Cuba, Your Real Performance Review Happens on the Black Market. In Japan, It Happens in a Room You'll Never Be Invited To.

🇨🇺 Cuba · 🇯🇵 Japan

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Roughly 64% of Cuban workers are still employed by the state, earning real, inflation-adjusted wages that economists estimate cover barely a sixth of what a basic monthly basket actually costs — which is why so many hold a second job entirely outside any formal review process. In Japan, meanwhile, a GLOBIS University faculty member's account of asking Japanese colleagues for honest feedback captures the opposite problem: "Oh. That's really embarrassing. How could you ask that? You're the boss." One country's feedback culture has been hollowed out by economic necessity; the other's has been engineered into near-total indirection by design. Neither will look anything like the performance review you're used to.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇺 Cuba

🇯🇵 Japan

Cuba: When the Real Evaluation Happens Off the Books

Formal performance review, as a distinct HR ritual, is not really the operative mechanism shaping Cuban work life — the structural economics are. Columbia Law School's Cuba Capacity Building Project puts hard numbers on the gap: around 64% of Cuban workers remained in the state sector as of 2022, with chronically low official compensation and minimal access to hard currency, while roughly 23% had moved into private employment chasing better pay, often at the cost of the paid leave and maternity protections state jobs still guarantee. The purchasing-power math is stark: 2022 real wages worked out to roughly CUP 2,032 a month against an economist-estimated CUP 32,000 needed to cover basic necessities — a gap wide enough that formal evaluation and promotion structures become almost beside the point next to the more urgent question of how workers actually make ends meet.

That urgency produces doble jornada — the "double workday" — where a state job coexists with informal secondary income, taxi driving or craft-selling among the most common. One Expat.com forum thread on finding work in Cuba captures the practical reality bluntly: foreign employment opportunities are narrow and structurally unusual (a foreign employer's Cuban staff often gets paid through the state, in a mix of currencies with real disparities in value), and one commenter's flat assessment — "there are few to no jobs for foreigners in Cuba and living in Cuba is way different than being a tourist" — is a useful corrective for anyone imagining a conventional expat HR experience there. Where formal recognition does function meaningfully, per Visit World's cultural guide, it's concentrated in specific prestige sectors: medicine, education, and biotechnology carry real professional respect that a base salary figure doesn't reflect.

Japan: Feedback Engineered to Never Sound Like Feedback

Japan's feedback culture is, by contrast, a fully developed and highly deliberate system — just one built to avoid anything resembling direct confrontation. JobsInJapan.com's guide lays out the mechanics precisely: "public praise, private criticism" as close to an inviolable rule, direct statements reframed as questions ("would it be worth considering how this might affect the schedule?" rather than "this plan has a problem"), and criticism cushioned with a positive frame before it's delivered at all. Underneath the visible meeting sits nemawashi — literally "preparing the roots of a tree before transplanting it" — the real work of building consensus privately, one stakeholder at a time, before anything is raised in a formal room. The meeting, in other words, is frequently a ratification of a decision already made elsewhere, not the venue where feedback actually happens.

GLOBIS Insights' interviews with its own faculty make the internal experience of this system legible from the inside. Megumi Taoka, herself Japanese, described the specific discomfort around critiquing colleagues rather than ideas: "we just want to keep it to ourselves. It's like an unspoken rule." Suzanne Price and Cristian Vlad, describing what happens when foreign managers ask Japanese staff directly for critical feedback, relayed a response that says everything about the power-distance gap: "Oh. That's really embarrassing. How could you ask that? You're the boss." The same piece notes organizations like Goldman Sachs as deliberate outliers, where a specific, engineered culture makes upward feedback feel safe — proof that the norm isn't immutable, just very strongly reinforced by default.

The Reckoning

These two countries arrive at nearly opposite feedback problems from opposite directions. Cuba's formal evaluation apparatus is structurally under-resourced relative to the actual economic decisions shaping people's working lives — the real "performance review," in effect, is whatever second income stream lets a household clear CUP 32,000 a month. Japan's formal evaluation apparatus is, if anything, over-engineered — an elaborate, carefully maintained system whose entire purpose is to prevent direct feedback from ever landing as direct feedback. A manager relocating from either country to the other would need to essentially reverse their entire theory of what a performance conversation is for: in Havana, worry less about the review and more about whether the compensation structure makes sense at all; in Tokyo, worry less about whether you're getting enough direct feedback and more about learning to hear the indirect kind.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com, Cuba forum, "dos and don'ts of finding a job in Cuba" — One long-term visitor's blunt summary of the employment reality for foreigners: "there are few to no jobs for foreigners in Cuba and living in Cuba is way different than being a tourist/visitor" — a corrective aimed squarely at anyone assuming a conventional expat career track is available there.

Same Expat.com thread, second voice (Armando Ruiz) — Explaining how compensation actually flows for foreign-employer staff: the Cuban government handles accounting and distributes wages in a currency split between CUC and regular Cuban pesos, "with the latter worth approximately 20% of CUC value" — a granular detail that tells you more about real Cuban take-home pay than any published wage figure alone.

GLOBIS Insights, faculty interview (Megumi Taoka) — On the specific discomfort of critiquing a colleague rather than an idea in a Japanese team setting: "We just want to keep it to ourselves. It's like an unspoken rule" — a rare, direct articulation of a norm most guides only describe from the outside.

GLOBIS Insights, same feature (Suzanne Price and Cristian Vlad) — Describing the reaction when a foreign manager asks Japanese staff to critique their own boss directly: "Oh. That's really embarrassing. How could you ask that? You're the boss." — the gap between a Western manager's good intentions and how the request actually lands, in one exchange.

Conclusion

If you're heading to Cuba, recalibrate what "performance" even means in a workplace context: formal review matters less than understanding the real, dual-track income structure most workers rely on, and the professional respect that does exist concentrates in a handful of prestige fields rather than a universal merit system. If you're heading to Japan, the work isn't demanding more direct feedback — it's building the fluency to hear the indirect kind that's already there, in the soft questions, the careful pre-meeting consensus-building, and the silences that aren't actually neutral. The honest version, over a drink: in Havana, ask about the second job before you ask about the review; in Tokyo, listen for what's not being said — that's usually where the actual verdict lives.