[lbo-talk] Cuba to lay off 500, 000 state workers: The beginning of the end of Cuban socialism

[Somebody Somebody]

Some more thoughts on the new privatization drive in Cuba. Since less than 70% of the country is of working age, and since roughly 20% of those are farmers, 500,000 workers comes out to be close to 8% of all potential workers in the country, and closer to 1 in 10 of all state workers. And Raul Castro has intimated that more layoffs will follow, and has spoken of letting of 1 million public workers. These are extraordinary figures.

In a few years Cuba will be a thoroughly mixed economy - but even this characterization will be deceptive, since it will obscure the trajectory of the country. It's interesting to me that here we have a case of the founding generation of a socialist revolution dismantling their own system. I don't know how anyone's supposed to take such Third World revolutionary projects seriously ever again.