[eastbay]

Even the Cubans know paying hundreds of thousands of people to not work generates poor worker morale, is bad social policy, and erosive to the financial strength of the nation. It would be nice if the USA followed Castro's lead in their common sense approach to national fiscal policy.

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')specially interesting was the part where he says something to the effect that he regrets urging the Soviets launch nukes on us. I guess he's an old man now and realizes that as a young firebrand he came very close to starting WWIII.

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', 'E')ven the Cubans know paying hundreds of thousands of people to not work generates poor worker morale, is bad social policy, and erosive to the financial strength of the nation. It would be nice if the USA followed Castro's lead in their common sense approach to national fiscal policy.

[efarmer]

Cuba is a plum for China to pick as a trade partner if we keep on pretending it is 1958.
Cuba owes us a bunch of money, China can fix this for them and send us some of our our T Bills
back. This will take our teeth off Cuba and bend us around in a donut shape so we can bite our
own ass and chew on it for awhile. Hey buddy, we beat those commies again, just like 1989!
The Chinese can get location, location, location, dirt cheap and invite some American military
down to watch commerce beat arms on an open ended basis while our carriers steam around the
big island with Mission Accomplished banners on them, it will not be a military threat and neither
will China. It will be an 800 mile long Latin Hong Kong 90 miles from Key West.

We are thumping ourselves on the back about defeating polio and dying of the swine flu.

[gollum]

Of course American style capitalism where we ship our jobs to China, pay banksters to lose money, and politicians to run the country like shit has been such a success (it has if you're that top 2%). I'm pretty convinced that within my lifetime most Americans will consider places like Cuba to be the mecca of innovation and culture if we continue on this economic course of wanton self destruction.

[Oakley]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gollum', 'O')f course American style capitalism where we ship our jobs to China, pay banksters to lose money, and politicians to run the country like shit has been such a success (it has if you're that top 2%). I'm pretty convinced that within my lifetime most Americans will consider places like Cuba to be the mecca of innovation and culture if we continue on this economic course of wanton self destruction.

[gollum]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Oakley', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gollum', 'O')f course American style capitalism where we ship our jobs to China, pay banksters to lose money, and politicians to run the country like shit has been such a success (it has if you're that top 2%). I'm pretty convinced that within my lifetime most Americans will consider places like Cuba to be the mecca of innovation and culture if we continue on this economic course of wanton self destruction.

[deMolay]

Goodbye Fidel You Billionaire Gangster and Chief State Butcher. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le1707318/

[americandream]

You're like a child in a playground. Badmouthing Castro with absurd allegations (especially for a man who in no way even remotely comes close to our Western leaders and their corrupt third world stooges in excess, opulence and psychopathy) in a bid to destroy the reasonable idea that the finite cannot sustain the infinite and must conclude with a violent catharsis, only demonstrates your infantile attachment to the non-viable.

Here is a clear reaon why there will be an almighty upheaval before any resolution of the sort of wasteful behaviour that sees our oceans daily overwhelmed by all the detritus of blind excess.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'G')oodbye Fidel You Billionaire Gangster and Chief State Butcher. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le1707318/

[eastbay]

Fidel hasn't a cent to his name. He lives as he teaches.

[deMolay]

Fidel's personal wealth has been ranked at 900M and up. He is a capitalist swine and a gangster. http://www.brookesnews.com/062205fontova.html

[deMolay]

From link. Fidel Castro’s true wealth

Humberto Fontova
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 22 May 2006

When Forbes magazine named him among the world’s richest heads of state in 2005 a furious Fidel Castro denounced it as “infamy!” “Do they think I'm some kind of Mobutu!” he raged. At the time Forbes estimated his fortune at $550 million.

This year Forbes raised his ranking to the world’s 7th richest head of state, with an estimated fortune of $900 million. “Repugnant slander!” Castro thundered on Cuban television sets (all twelve of them) this week. The “President” of Cuba’s National Bank, Francisco Soberon, also chimed in: “The Cuban revolution and its Maximum Leader are an example of honesty and ethical conduct in this chaotic and corrupt world into which the empire has cast humanity,” he added.

Actually, Castro has a point. He has no business being lumped in with measly millionaire chumps like Mobutu Sese Seko and Queen Elizabeth. Forbes admits that its estimate of Castro's wealth is "more art than science," and is based on his partial ownership of state enterprises, among them the Havana Convention Center, the Cimex retail conglomerate and Medicuba. But as Cuban-American scholar Eugenio Yanez asks: why not include many other, and much larger, Cuban state enterprises like Cubatabaco, Artex, Cubacatricos, Cubatecnica, Gaviota, Acemex, Cubatur, Antex, Caribat, Cubatur, and many more? The list is much longer than those singled out by Forbes.

Another method used by Forbes was calculating that Castro owns roughly ten per cent of the Cuban GDP. Why only ten percent? All enterprises in Cuba are state enterprises, including so-called "joint-ventures" with foreign investors, as shown by a Miami Herald headline from June of 2005: Many Foreign Investors Being Booted Out of Cuba it read. “It’s outrageous!” the Herald quoted a Spanish businessmen leaving Cuba. ‘“I’ve gone through endless meetings for more than a year with no result in terms of recovering our investment!”’ he whimpered.

“What I can't accept,” wailed another European businessman, “is simply being booted out of here with no solid guarantee I will ever get my money back!”' Our hearts bleed for these unfortunate gentlemen. Also notice: the investors were being booted out of Cuba. But the investments remained, as did those of the 5,911 businesses valued at close to $2 billion stolen at gunpoint from U.S. owners and investors in 1960. A few owners who resisted like Howard Anderson, who had his Jeep dealership stolen, and Tom Fuller, whose family farm was stolen, were promptly murdered by Castro and Che’s firing squads.

Interestingly, new Bolivian president Evo Morales had a lengthy meeting with Fidel Castro just last week. Immediately upon returning to Bolivia, Morales announced the “nationalization” (looting) of all the foreign-owned (primarily Brazilian) natural gas companies in Bolivia. Rafael Dausa, Cuba’s brand new ambassador to Bolivia, is among Cuba’s highest ranking intelligence officers.

Fidel Castro is officially Cuba’s Chief of State, Head of Government, Prime Minister, First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Bank President Francisco Soberon didn’t refer to him as the “Maximum Leader” for nothing. So why does Forbes only estimate his control of Cuba’s GDP at ten-per-cent?

“The right to enjoy and to dispose of things in the most absolute manner as he pleases,” is how a legal dictionary defines property. To “dispose” is the key phrase in the legal definition of property. In brief: something is genuinely yours only if you have the right to sell it. As such, Castro owns 100 per cent of Cuban enterprises along with the full fruits of the labor of his 11 million subjects.

Article 33.1. of the Cuban Constitution states: The workers in joint ventures who are Cuban shall be contracted by an employing entity proposed by the (Cuban) Ministry of Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation, and authorized by the (Cuban)Ministry of Labor and Social Security. Article 33.4. states: Payments to Cuban workers in Cuba shall be made in national currency, which must be obtained beforehand from convertible foreign currency.

In other words, say the Cuban Ministry of Labor decides that the salary for your Cuban laborers (who are forbidden under penalty of prison or firing squad from striking) is 100 pesos a week. Then you would pay 100 dollars or Euros per laborer to the Cuban government (of which Castro is Maximum Leader).

The government stashes this currency and pays the hapless Cuban worker 100 worthless Cuban pesos, which varies in value from 15-20 per U.S. dollar. In in the Dark and Fascistic Batista Age the Cuban peso was always interchangeable one to one with the U.S. dollar. Elsewhere they call this chattel slavery. Neither Red China nor Red Vietnam have such mandates for foreign investors.

A Cuban resident is most valuable to Castro when he wants to escape Cuba. This writer’s family paid $15,000 to get a cousin out of Cuba in the early 60’s. This was not an easy amount for destitute refugees to round up at the time, but the firing squads were working triple shifts and Cuba’s prisons were filled to suffocation. You weren’t only paying for a loved ones’ freedom, you might also be paying for his (or her) life.

Armando Valladares, who somehow escaped the firing squad but spent 22 torture-filled years in Cuba's Gulag, described his trial very succinctly: “not one witness to accuse me, not one to identify me, not one single piece of evidence against me.” Valladares had been arrested in his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk.

One day in early 1959 one of Che’s Revolutionary Courts actually found a Cuban army captain named Pedro Morejon innocent of the charge of “war-criminal”. This brought Che’s fellow comandante, Camilo Cienfuegos to his feet. “If Morejon is not executed,” He yelled. “I’ll put a bullet through his head myself!” The court reassembled frantically and quickly arrived at a new verdict. Morejon crumpled in front of a firing squad the following day.

As Castro’s chief executioner, Che Guevara, explained it: “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” So you can see the sense of urgency of getting a relative out, especially if the authorities had set their sights on him as a counter-revolutionary. Elsewhere they call such a judiciary process at the hands of dictators, “death squads.” Most Cuban-exile families can relate similar cases of ransoming relatives. Elsewhere they call this “kidnapping and extortion.”

Cuba’s campesinos (country folk) were among the first to learn the bitter lesson of ownership in Castro's Cuba and consequently rise in arms against Castroism. In 1959 with cameras rolling, flashbulbs popping and reporters scribbling, Castro’s much-lauded “Institute of Agrarian Reform” made a big show of handing out land “titles” to thousands of beaming campesinos.

Soon these new “owners” learned they were prohibited from selling “their” land. More interestingly, the produce grown on “their” land could only be sold to the government. More interesting still, the price paid for “their” produce was the government's whim. Elsewhere they called this “serfdom.”

Castro quickly ended the charade and all agricultural laborers were herded into granjas, i.e. collective farms identical to Soviet kolkhozes. Indeed, Soviet agricultural “advisors,” still flush from their success in the Ukraine, had been advising Cuba’s INRA (Institute of Agrarian Reform) from day one. The Cuban campesino’s desperate, bloody and lonely rebellion against their enslavement spread to the towns and cities and lasted from late 1959 to 1966.

Castro himself admitted that his troops, militia and Soviet advisors were up against 179 different “bands of bandits” as they labelled these freedom-fighting rednecks. Tens of thousands of troops, scores of Soviet advisors, and squadrons of Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers finally extinguished the lonely Cuban freedom-fight. Elsewhere they call this “an insurgency.”

This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you'll read about it in the MSM and all you’ll learn about it from those illustrious Ivy-League Academics. To get an idea of the odds faced by those rural rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of “Scarface.” Enrique Encinosa documents this heroic rebellion in his superb book, Unvanquished. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” was a how one of the few surviving rebels described their insurgency.

In 1962 the Kennedy-Khrushchev swindle that “solved” the Missile Crisis — not only starved these freedom-fighters of the measly aid they’d been getting from Cuban-exile freebooters (who were rounded up for violating U.S. neutrality laws) — it also sanctioned the 44,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. Elsewhere they call this “foreign occupation.”

Leftists wail about the U.S. “occupation” of Iraq, where 125,000 U.S troops are stationed in a nation of 25 million. Leftists also applaud how Castro “liberated” Cuba from “foreign imperialism.” Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1962, with 44,000 Soviet troops amongst them. Put your calculator to those figures and calculate the ratio vs the current one for Iraq. If we’re occupying Iraq, what where the Soviets — at Castro and Che’s behest — doing to Cuba?

A few years earlier, with Castro's rebels skirmishing against (mostly bribing, actually) Batista’s army, U.S. reporters had swarmed into Cuba’s hills lugging cameras and tape recorders for fawning interviews with the gallant Fidel and his strutting rebel comandantes. Print reporters from Herbert Matthews of the New York Times to Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, TV figures from Robert Taber of CBS to Ed Sullivan, all interviewed (soft-soaped) the Cuban Robin Hood for the folks back home.

Even a reporter for Boy’s Life magazine made the scene. All this coming and going by foreign press agencies was somehow managed while Cuba suffered under “a stifling and murderous dictatorship!” or so these reporters and commentators constantly reminded their gaping audience. To accommodate the media mob, Castro’s people camp finally assembled a separate building at his campsite with a sign “Press Hut.”

Came a genuine rebellion against a genuine dictatorship — and one involving ten times the number of rebels (and casualties) as the one against Batista as well as lasting twice as long — and nary an intrepid reporter was to be found anywhere near Cuba’s hills. Not that these “valiant crusaders for the truth,” as Columbia School of Journalism hails their noble profession, weren’t in Cuba. From Laura Berquist of Look Magazine to Jean Daniel of The New Republic to Lee Lockwood of Life they were all in Havana lining up for fawning “interviews” — not with the rebels this time — but with their jailers and assassins, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

If the Britain in V for Vendetta bordered Castro's Cuba she'd be mobbed with grateful political refugees who’d scale walls to bask in her relative freedom. At one point in 1961 one of every 18 Cubans was a poltical prisoner, a higher ratio than in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.

Castro can dispose of every business on his captive island in any manner he chooses. He can do the same with his every Cuban captive. He can just as easily rent them out as slave labor, as sell them for ransom, as jail them, as shoot them. Forbes lists only the tiny-tip of the Castro-wealth iceberg.


* * * * * *

[deMolay]

From the Globe Link:, Paul Haven and Andrea Rodriguez

Havana — The Associated Press
Published on Tuesday, Sep. 14, 2010 3:46PM EDT

Last updated on Tuesday, Sep. 14, 2010 3:59PM EDT


An internal Communist Party document envisions a radically revamped Cuban economy, with a new tax code, freshly legalized private co-operatives and a state payroll no longer shackled by the need to support at least a half-million idle or unproductive workers.

The document – obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press – also offers a cold dose of reality for those who think reforming one of the last bastions of Soviet-style communism will be easy: It warns that many of the new businesses will be shuttered within a year.

The 26-page document fleshes out some of the details of sweeping layoffs of 500,000 workers by March, 2011, that Cuba announced Monday in the most dramatic reform instituted since President Raul Castro took over from his ailing brother, Fidel, in 2008.

Workers at the ministries of sugar, tourism and agriculture will be let go first – and some layoffs at those entities already began in July, it said. The last in line for cutbacks include the civil aviation sector and the Ministry of Social Services – the very agency charged with overseeing the layoffs.

No government sector appears to go untouched, with cuts slated for Cuba's vaunted athletics program – long favoured under sports-crazy Fidel Castro since the early days of his 1959 revolution – and even its Health and Education Ministries.

Taken together, the plan represents the largest shift to private enterprise since the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union forced cash-strapped Cuba to legalize the U.S. dollar and allow people to open private restaurants and small vegetable stands. Many of those reforms were rolled back once the severe economic crisis eased.

It was Fidel Castro himself who led the effort to scale back those reforms – and now his brother is in charge. Indeed, analysts said the tone of this week's announcement is entirely different, signalling that the changes are here to stay.

“When they expanded self-employment in the 1990s, it was to get out of a crisis, and officials really didn't want to talk about it,” said Phil Peters, a Cuba specialist at the Lexington Institute near Washington. “But here, Raul Castro has decided that the government and its enterprises have to shed a large number of employees, and so this shift to the private sector is to achieve one of his strategic objectives.”

The document obtained by AP – which is dated Aug. 24 and laid out like a PowerPoint presentation with bullet points and large headlines – said many laid-off workers will be urged to form private co-operatives. Others will be pushed into jobs at foreign-run companies and joint ventures. Still more will need to set up small business – particularly in the areas of transportation, food and house rental.

It even explained what to look for when deciding whom to lay off. Those whose pay is not in line with their low productivity and those who lack discipline or are not interested in work will go first. It said some dismissed workers should be offered jobs in the public sector.

The plan hints at higher wages for the best workers – something Raul Castro has been promising for years – but said, “It is not possible to reform salaries in the current situation.”

The outline includes a long list of “ideas for co-operatives,” including raising animals and growing vegetables, construction jobs, driving a taxi and repairing automobiles – even making sweets and dried fruit.

But it warned that many of the fledgling businesses won't get off the ground because laid-off workers often lack the experience, skill or initiative to make it on their own.

“Many of them could fail within a year,” the document said, without outlining what to do with people whose enterprises go under.

The reforms received a lukewarm response from Washington, with a State Department spokesman noting the U.S. is also interested in seeing political change on the island.

“Opening the Cuban system – economically and politically – is clearly in the interest of the Cuban people,” State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet told AP. “If these changes in fact provide for more space for individual Cuban entrepreneurs and businesses to operate, that would be positive.”

Already, 823,000 Cubans work in the private sector, including about 144,000 that work for themselves legally. The state still employs the other 84 per cent of the 5.1 million-member work force.

Those statistics don't include an unknown number of Cubans working quietly on the black market, who pay no tax on what they earn. In a country where doctors and scientists make only slightly more than the national average monthly salary of $20 (U.S.), it is not uncommon to see surgeons driving illegal taxis in their spare time.

The internal document refers to a “new tax system” that will be “more personalized and more rigorous.” It says taxes will be collected on wages, sales, social security payments to retirees and on small businesses that employ people.

The payroll tax is particularly striking, as it envisions some Cubans getting rich off the labour of their compatriots, a major departure for a government that long said it was marching toward an egalitarian utopia.

Some doubt the change can be pulled off.

Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a state-trained economist who is now an anti-communist dissident, said the changes are long overdue. But he worried that the government would not create an environment conducive to private enterprise and instead would try to mandate free enterprise from above.

“If they are going to start co-operatives, they need to let people make their own decisions, without imposing anything on them,” he said. “The co-operatives need to be real initiatives of those doing the producing, not created from on high.”

Mr. Peters, who has long favoured expanded co-operation with Cuba, acknowledged the challenges, but said he had no doubt the government would follow through.

“These are serious changes that are going to expand the private sector in Cuba and improve the welfare of many thousands of Cuban families as they engage in entrepreneurship,” he said. “There are going to be zigs and zags because it is a big change, but it is clearly a move toward a much larger private sector inside a socialist economy.”

Euridis Rivero, 34, who makes a living selling pizza and ham sandwiches from his private stand in Havana, could be a vision of Cuba's future. He pays 315 Cuban pesos ($15) a month in taxes, and keeps any other profits for himself.

Mr. Rivero said the sweeping changes announced Monday are good, but that many who have grown accustomed to a steady state paycheck will have trouble adjusting.

“People are worried,” he said. “They like working for the state, but the state can't afford to pay them.”

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', 'F')idel hasn't a cent to his name. He lives as he teaches.

[americandream]

Power is a given in politics. It's how you use it that sets the thief apart from the statesman. Stalin was a statesman. Disciplined, firm, shrewd and a force the capitalist and their lackeys in the mongrel Hitler's "Aryan" Germany had not accounted for.

The steel boot that the obese and flatulent capitalist ass will feel in due course.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pretorian', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', 'F')idel hasn't a cent to his name. He lives as he teaches.

[americandream]

DeMolay

Enjoy the illusion whilst it lasts.

[americandream]

A KGB officer, Alexei Novikov, stated that Castro's personal life, like the lives of the rest of the Communist elite, is "shrouded under an impenetrable veil of secrecy". Among other things, he asserted that Castro has a personal guard of more than 9,700 men and three luxurious yachts.[186]

In 2005, American business and financial magazine Forbes listed Castro among the world's richest people, with an estimated net worth of $550 million. The estimates, which the magazine admitted were "more art than science",[188] claimed that the Cuban leader's personal wealth was nearly double that of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, despite anecdotal evidence from diplomats and businessmen that the Cuban leader's personal life was notably austere.[187] This assessment was drawn by making economic estimates of the net worth of Cuba's state-owned companies, and used the assumption that Castro had personal economic control.[189] Forbes Magazine later increased the estimates to $900 million, adding rumors of large cash stashes in Switzerland.[187] The magazine offered no proof of this information,[188] and according to CBS news, Castro's entry on the rich list was notably brief compared to the amount of information provided on other figures.[188] Castro, who had considered suing the magazine, responded that the claims were "lies and slander", and that they were part of a US campaign to discredit him.[187] He declared: "If they can prove that I have a bank account abroad, with $900m, with $1m, $500,000, $100,000 or $1 in it, I will resign."[187] President of Cuba's Central Bank, Francisco Soberón, called the claims a "grotesque slander", asserting that money made from various state owned companies is pumped back into the island's economy, "in sectors including health, education, science, internal security, national defense and solidarity projects with other countries."[189]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro

[deMolay]

americandream, you are what used to be known as a useful idiot. Stalin or Castro back in the day woud have given you a blindfold first. It is a measure of your child like intelligence and immaturity to ignore the historical facts taken from the survivors of the extreme gangsterism/communist regimes. Led by leftwing nutcases and mass murderers like Castro, Stalin, Mao etc. And they amount to thousands of pages of testimony of survivors of these butchers. You are a stooge and a cuckhold.

[deMolay]

The Great Gangster Communist Castro Proudly leading the way in Public Sector Cutbacks. Has to improve his bottom line, and fatten his Billionaire status at Forbes etc. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... -cutbacks/

[deMolay]

From Link. Lorne Gunter: Castro’s Cuba — Proudly leading the way in public-sector cutbacks
Lorne Gunter September 15, 2010 – 7:29 am

Quick, name the source of the following statement, issued Monday:

“Our government cannot and should not continue maintaining companies, productive entities, services and budgeted sectors with bloated payrolls [and] losses that hurt the economy.”

No, it’s not one of Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union addresses or a speech by Margaret Thatcher, although those would be reasonable guesses. And, no, it’s not a page from Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution platform, circa 1995.

It’s not even for the latest Fraser Institute, Canadian Taxpayers Federation or National Citizens Coalition study on the failure of stimulus spending and the growth of public debt in Canada. And it’s definitely not a remark made by federal Finance Minister Jim “Bloated Budget” Flaherty.

It’s from the Cuban Labour Federation, the government-run, union governing body on the communist Caribbean island, and it is part of an official announcement that over the next six months, 500,000 public-sector jobs will be cut there.

At a time when purportedly free-market Western governments are running enormous deficits and hiring tens of thousands of new public-sector workers in a vain attempt to prop up their economies, socialist Cuba has just announced massive and immediate layoffs in its public sector.

What gives?

Cuba seems intent on privatizing its economy, undoubtedly to reduce public expenditures. Because nearly every industry — from agriculture to tourism to rum and cigar making — is government run, nearly 85% of working Cubans are state employees. According to StatsCan, at the end of June this year, 20.3% of Canadian workers (3.6 million) worked for one level of government or another, or for a public hospital, school, university or Crown corporation.

The Cuban government’s announcement means roughly 8.5% of the Cuban workforce of 6 million will be displaced over the next 180 days. With just over 17 million Canadians in the workforce, the equivalent here would be nearly 1.5 million workers losing their jobs. Everybody would know people (and perhaps even several people) who were being pushed out of their jobs.

The social, economic and political implications are enormous.

There may have been some hint of the upheaval last week when the father of Cuba’s Marxist-Leninist revolution and the country’s former dictator, Fidel Castro, admitted to The Atlantic Monthly reporter Jeffrey Goldberg that socialism “doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

Since an intestinal ailment forced Castro to turn over official control of the government to his brother Raul two years ago, the younger Castro has been trying timid market and political reforms with big brother’s approval. Ordinary Cubans may now own satellite televisions and laptops (although few can afford to), toasters, electric ovens and even air conditioners. Most consumer electronics were banned in the 1990s when the Soviets withdrew their annual oil subsidy, making reliable electric power a scarce commodity. But their prohibition didn’t hurt the government’s control of dissident messages, either.

However, none of this compares to Monday’s announcement in terms of the implications for Cuban society. If jobs cannot be found for these half million displaced workers, social upheaval could result.

There are currently only 143,000 self-employed Cubans. By March, the government hopes to issue licenses for 250,000 more. And the official expectation is that these new entrepreneurs will hire most of the remaining 250,000 former public sector workers.

“We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live without working,” Raul said last month. Hear, hear. Now if only we could erase forever the notion that Cuba is an example of socialist success from the minds of North American labour leaders, sociology professors and medicare activists.

Can this massive reform succeed? Perhaps. Another of Raul’s reforms has been to permit more trade in U.S. dollars. If the entrepreneurial spirit of Cubans in the U.S. can be translated to those back home – along with millions of Yankee greenbacks – the Cubans might just pull off this experiment.

But if it does succeed, expect it to force democratization and more personal freedom, too. When people start to pay their own way, they like to have more of a say over how they’re governed.

National Post
lgunter@shaw.ca


Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... z0zbVQDmWz