Cuba inches toward Libre

At least Fidel has admitted that his communist experiment has failed. That's a start. Pretty soon, the captives on the island prison will begin to act like the people of Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere when they too demand freedom. Imagine a Cuba once again available to Americans. Of course the time to see it is now, before the decaying state is wiped away and replaced with something healthier, but lacking the seedy charm it has now.

Castro resigns as party head as Cuba mulls reforms

by Isabel Sanchez Isabel Sanchez – Tue Apr 19

HAVANA (AFP) – Fidel Castro confirmed his exit from the Communist Party leadership on Tuesday, ceding power to his brother Raul as delegates prepare to vote on changes that could bring term limits to key posts.

The move came after the sixth Communist Party Congress approved a flurry of measures on Monday aimed at keeping Cuba's centrally planned economy from collapse but without any broad embrace of market-oriented change.

"Raul knew that I would not accept a formal role in the party today," Fidel wrote in an article on the Cubadebate.cu portal, referring to his absence from the party's new Central Committee, elected on Monday.

Castro, 84, had served as first secretary in the Central Committee of the party -- which underpins the country's Communist government -- since the party's creation in 1965.

Fidel said he had handed over the functions of the party head to Raul when he ceded power to his brother because of his own declining health in 2006, though he retained the first secretary title.

"(Raul) has always been who I described as First Secretary and Commander in Chief," Fidel wrote in the article.

"He never failed to convey to me the ideas that were planned," he added.

Castro said he supported the stepping aside of some of the older luminaries in the party, adding that "the most important thing was that I did not appear on that list.

"I have received too many honors. I never thought I would live so long."

The 1,000 delegates gathered in Havana for the four-day party congress have meanwhile approved some 300 economic proposals.

The reforms promise to inject a modicum of the free market into the island's economy ahead of a vote Tuesday expected to officially relieve Castro of his position as party head.

Reforms include the eventual trimming of a million state jobs and the decentralization of the agricultural sector.

Many of the measures have already been adopted over the past year, with the Congress now formally approving them.

Results of the voting on leadership term limits will be presented Tuesday, when Fidel would be finally officially replaced as party chief.

Raul, who turns 80 on June 3, was expected to take over as the party's new first secretary.

Raul said on Saturday that he backed term limits of 10 years for the top leadership spots, in a country he and his brother have led for more than five decades.

Fidel said he "liked the idea. I thought long and hard about the subject."

Cuba watchers were meanwhile focused on who would ascend to the party's number two position, which could signal the direction of an eventual transfer of power in the coming years.

Raul has rejected broader market-minded reforms like those adopted by China, saying they would be "in open contradiction to the essence of socialism... because they were calling for allowing the concentration of property."

Cubans have reacted to the reforms with cautious optimism, hoping that the government follows through with its pledges without harming those who depend on the public sector for employment and other basic needs.

Mikaela, the 28-year-old owner of a small beauty salon in the old city of Havana, hoped they would "give us the means to work and earn a living.

"That is all we need," she told AFP.

Herminia Diaz, 40, who left a career as an engineer and now rents out her house to earn a living, was skeptical that change would actually come.

"I like Raul's frankness in dealing with our problems, but when you think that they have been going on for 30 years, and that we've done nothing to resolve them, you just lose hope," she said.

"It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, that we've wasted all these years."

Pandora's Box to Arrive Soon in Havana

This oughta be good. Cuba is about to a get high-speed broadband Internet, a gift from Venezuela. With the arrival of this portal to the world, Cubans will discover things at home are worse than they ever knew.

How much of the content can Cuban censors block? Probably a lot. But not all, which means the deprived people of Cuba will swallow another dose of the reality imposed on them by the dictatorial Castro regime that exists only to perpetuate itself.

Broadband cable on its way to unplugged CubaFibre-optic cable laid from Venezuela brings the promise of speedy internet to one of the world's least connected countries

Sunday 23 January 2011

Cuba is set to join the high-speed broadband era with an undersea fibre-optic cable laid from Venezuela, bringing the promise of speedy internet to one of the world's least connected countries.

A specialised ship sailed from Camuri beach, near the Venezuelan port of La Guaria, this weekend, trailing the cable from buoys on the start of a 1,000-mile journey across the Caribbean sea.

Venezuelan and Cuban officials hailed the project as a blow to the United States' embargo on the island. It will make Cuba's connection speed 3,000 times faster and modernise its economy.

"This means a giant step for the independence and sovereignty of our people," Rogelio Polanco, Cuba's ambassador to Caracas, said at a pomp-filled ceremony in tropical sunshine.

The ship, Ile de Batz, owned by the French company Alcatel-Lucent, will lay the cable at depths of up to 5,800 metres and is expected to reach eastern Cuba by 8 February. Cuba's government said the cable should be in use by June or July.

Cuba has some censorship restrictions but the impact could be profound. The country has just 14.2 internet users per 100 people, the western hemisphere's lowest ratio, with access largely restricted to government offices, universities, foreign companies and tourist hotels.

The 50-year-old US embargo prevented Cuba tapping into Caribbean fibre-optic cables, forcing it to rely on a slow, expensive satellite link of just 379 megabits per second.

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, Havana's closest ally, funded the $70m (£43.8m) cable and named it Alba-1, after the region's Caracas-led leftwing alliance. Improved communication is necessary to effect "historic, political and cultural change", said Ricardo Menéndez, Venezuela's science, technology and industry minister.

The cable should boost President Raúl Castro's drive to modernise Cuba's centrally planned economy and make state enterprises slimmer and more efficient. About 500,000 state workers will lose their jobs this year. In addition to broadband, the cable will let Cuba's creaky telephone system handle millions of calls at once. It will be extended to Jamaica next year.

Cuban officials said the priority would be improving communications for those who already had access to the island's intranet, a government-controlled version of the internet. Broadband would mean higher quality communication but not necessarily "broader" communication, said the communist daily newspaper Granma, dampening hopes of an information explosion.

Most Cubans would still have to rely on state media for news,, meaning a diet of propaganda about government successes and distorted reporting of the outside world, said Antonio González-Rodiles, 38, a scientist in Havana. "I think it's pretty unlikely they are going to let Cubans access this immense information source, given there's no clear [state] desire to democratise our society and reduce censorship. A lot of things are going to have to change before Cubans will be able to navigate this sea of information."

The recent lifting of a ban on mobile phones and personal computers means more information is bypassing state channels, especially through the use of memory sticks, but high costs and state monitoring may have limited the impact.

Bloggers such as Yoani Sánchez have won attention and plaudits abroad for their chronicles of daily life, but they remain a marginal force at home.

Cuba's usual form of international communication – post – received a setback at the weekend when Havana suspended all deliveries to the US.

Authorities said sacks of mail were being returned from the US because of tighter counter-terrorism restrictions, following an attempt to smuggle explosives in cargo from Yemen.

Returning the packages was costing Cuba's postal service, prompting the abrupt suspension until further notice of a service which only resumed in 2009 after a 42-year gap during the cold war. The Obama administration lifted the postal ban in what was seen as a cautious effort to improve ties with Havana.

Castro's Useful Idiots

Weekend at Fidel's Jeffrey Goldberg is not the first American journalist to cuddle up to Castro.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

At most marine parks in the world the animals provide the entertainment. But at the Havana aquarium last month, Fidel Castro had a couple of humans eating out of his hand and clapping like trained seals.

I refer here to the Atlantic Monthly's Jeffrey Goldberg, who traveled recently to Cuba at Castro's invitation with his friend Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Goldberg has posted a two-part report from his lengthy conversations with the dictator online for the magazine. One part includes details of a day at the aquarium, where Mr. Goldberg, accompanied by Ms. Sweig, seems to have experienced more than one "thrill going up [his] leg" in the presence of Fidel.

The reporter "hope[s] to be publishing a more comprehensive article about the subject in a forthcoming print edition of the Atlantic." I'm guessing that anyone who actually knows something about Castro's Cuba is not the target audience.

Castro again has an urgent need to put a smiley face on his dictatorship. The economy is in dire straits. Food is scarce, electricity is a rarity, and soap and toilet paper are luxuries. Cuba produces almost nothing and this makes it difficult to get hard currency—aka real money—which in turn makes it tough to buy from abroad. Lending sources have dried up.

If the regime is to stay in power, it needs a new source of income to pay the secret police and keep the masses in rice. The best bet is the American tourist, last seen circa 1950 exploiting the locals, according to revolutionary lore, but now needed by the regime. It wants the U.S. travel ban lifted. To prevail, Castro needs to counteract rumors that he is a dictator. Solution: a makeover in the Atlantic. In Mr. Goldberg, he no doubt recognized the perfect candidate for the job.

Fidel's step one was to tell Mr. Goldberg that he is outraged by anti-Semitism. "I don't think that anyone has been slandered more than the Jews," the old man proclaims to his guests. And by the way, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should "stop picking on the Jews." When Mr. Goldberg asks whether Castro will tell the Iranian himself, Castro says, "I am saying this so you can communicate it." Translation: This should be the headline of your piece so that the American people will recognize my benevolence. Mr. Goldberg complied.

We are supposed to conclude that Cuba is no longer a threat to global stability and that Fidel is a reformed tyrant. But how believable is a guy whose revolution all but wiped out Cuba's tiny Jewish community of 15,000, and who spent the past 50 years supporting the terrorism of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Syria, Libya and Iran? And how does Castro explain Venezuela, where Cuban intelligence agents run things, Iran is an ally and anti-Semitism has been state policy in recent years? Mr. Goldberg doesn't go there with Fidel.

It also is passing strange that we hear nothing from Mr. Goldberg about poor Alan Gross. Mr. Gross, a U.S. government contractor and a Jew, has been languishing in a Cuban prison since December. His crime: distributing computers to a handful of Cuban Jews who want to establish contact with the diaspora. Is that any way to show love for the Jewish people?

It never seems to cross Mr. Goldberg's mind that he is being used in a manner Communists first learned at Lenin's knee. Or perhaps he is happy to be useful. In a follow-up post he explains that since Fidel is not as bad as Pol Pot, Cubans should stop complaining. And to demonstrate further how little he knows about the plight of the Cuban people, he says that the "release" of political prisoners "is currently being negotiated." Wrong. Some have been exiled; some others may receive conditional parole meaning that they can be returned to prison at any time if the regime disapproves of their activities.

Mr. Goldberg is peddling his Castro interviews as serious journalism. But while he was "curious" to get a "glimpse of the great man," he was ill-prepared for the job. Presumably he knew this, which is why he allowed Ms. Sweig to lead him around Havana by the nose.

This set him up for failure because Ms. Sweig—an academic with easy access to the island while critics are banned—is a trusted friend of the dictatorship. "Fidel greeted Julia warmly; they have known each other for more than twenty years," Mr. Goldberg reports.

When Castro declares that the Cuban model no longer works, Mr. Goldberg turns to Ms. Sweig, as if there is something profound to be grasped. He is not saying "the ideas of the Revolution" have failed, she explains, but only that the state "has much too big a role" in the economy. Right, except that the state-owned economy is the idea of the revolution.

It is hardly surprising, then, that what we get from this interview is warmed-over Barbara Walters, another whose heart went pitter patter when she got close to the Cuban despot. This encounter also produced nothing of substance.

Cuban Capitalism is Coming

Fidel can call it whatever he likes, but the word is capitalism. The Cuban dictator may not admit it, but capitalism is the force that puts food on the table, a roof over one's head and a little money in the bank. He can continue his failing experiment in Marxist madness till he dies. But after he's gone, the US is likely to end the embargo of Cuba and thereby start a capitalist revolution on the island. That might bring McDonalds to Havana, but it will also bring Cubans everything they've lived without for 50 years. For example, common US products such as house paint. And cars built after the 1950s.

Remarkably, Obama is positioned to defeat Cuban communism by simply declaring an end to the US embargo. By putting Cuba on the same footing as China, the Cuban government would crumble as American tourists and opportunists swarmed over the island, making it impossible for Castro to police the economic activities inside his national prison. Even though Obama has the opportunity to win a war with a pen rather than a sword, he is doing nothing.


Cuba Resets the Revolution

Cuba allows private enterprise, but on a very restricted scale.

September 18, 2010

For first-time visitors, one of the most striking things about Cuba is the lack of advertising on the landscape. The Socialist government has billboards bearing Fidel Castro’s likeness and his most quotable quotations. But one does not see roadside signs pitching much else.

Could the Cuba of the not-too-distant future feature signs touting “Joel’s Moving Company,” “Dayana’s Furniture Repair,” “Julio’s Boutique”?

Probably. And there will be other changes, bigger and more wrenching, if harder to see. On a scale not known for half a century, Cubans will be hiring other Cubans for small-scale enterprises, creating boss-employee relationships without the direct involvement of the Communist Party. The idea of receiving a paycheck whether one loafs, sleeps or shows up at all will be under a new challenge. And it is possible that creating a cadre of quasi-capitalists could unleash forces that the Castros or their successors will prove unable to control.

But is Cuba approaching a transformation of the kind that swept Russia and China? It is tempting to imagine so, if only because the news about a move to private employment seems so startling.

Nevertheless, experts on Cuba warn against reading any such far-reaching expectations into last week’s announcement, no matter how ambitious a task it seems to recondition Cubans for a system that will require some to sink or swim.

Yes, the Castro government is acknowledging a deep problem. But it has also always linked its core ideology to its fear and disdain of the United States and the American economic system. So its ferocious pursuit of independence from American economic influence — even as it denounces Washington’s embargo on trade — would make a radical shift to joining the global free-trade system that the United States dominates particularly difficult to explain.

A Cuban sociologist, Haroldo Dilla, predicts that in the end the new system will not enable Cubans to rise too far out of poverty, and that the government will resist a true economic opening with the world.

Which is not to say that the leadership wants no change at all. Over the two decades since Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, Cuban officials have visited Russia, Vietnam and China and undoubtedly have taken some lessons from each. President Raúl Castro has made it plain that he views Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reinvigorate the Soviet political system, which led to Communism’s collapse, as a cautionary tale. The mix of consumerism and authoritarianism that one finds in Vietnam and China is presumably a more palatable model — privatization, but with the state in firm control.

Still, the plan announced so far is much more modest than what the Asian countries have done. Instead, it seems designed simply to boost Cuba’s economic productivity in small-scale enterprises and thus loosen up a state-run economy and work force that have been sputtering for more than a decade. That goal is in line with what Raúl Castro himself said last month: “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working.”

The announcement of layoffs also does not represent the first time that Cuba has experimented with privatization. A host of small-scale occupations is already allowed on the island, including pizza deliverymen and party clowns. And Cubans can, if they jump through enough bureaucratic hoops, open restaurants in their homes or house guests in spare bedrooms.

It would be far more difficult for either Fidel or Raúl Castro to emulate their neighbors in the Caribbean, without challenging the basic precepts of the Cuban revolution. For decades now, many of those countries have been taking advantage of their ties to the West and the United States to diversify their economies. Cuba, instead, continued to rely on one export commodity — sugar — which the Soviet Union bought at subsidized prices. Only relatively recently has it invited some European partners for joint ventures; for example, in tourism.

But a broad opening to new manufacturing, for example, would be different. That would presumably mean welcoming an influx of private capital from abroad to produce export goods on Cuban soil. It would also probably require normalizing trade and diplomatic relations with the world’s biggest consumer market, the United States. And it might even invite efforts to return to Cuba by exiles who still have claims on industrial enterprises they left — or were forced to leave — as enemies of the revolution.

What’s more, in China and Vietnam the path toward a modern economy was carefully coordinated with a series of steps toward normalization of relations with the United States. Could Cuba’s new economic strategy be a signal of readiness for such a package? That would be difficult to say this early. Some Cuba-watchers suggest that a mass release of political prisoners from Cuban jails in recent months is such a signal. But the history of Cuban-American communication since 1958 is rife with the misreading of oblique signals, even if the prisoner release qualifies as one.

Of course, Cuba and the United States are more linked than government officials in both capitals like to admit — through family bonds, for example.

“If fully carried out, a major expansion of Cuba’s private sector will benefit many thousands of Cuban families and give Cuban-Americans opportunities through remittances to help relatives in Cuba who will be working on their own,” Philip Peters, who follows economic matters in Cuba for the security- and free-market-oriented Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., wrote in a post on his blog, the Cuban Triangle, on Thursday.

Ted Henken, a professor at Baruch College who studies private enterprise in Cuba, epitomizes the ambivalence with which prudent Cuba-watchers are assessing the latest news. He said he was thrilled by it, but was hedging his bets on how transformative the change would be.

“This is the beginning of what we’ve all been waiting for,” he said. “It’s a major change in the way the Cuban economic system will work. It will be felt by every Cuban.” But, he added, “they still want to maintain state control. We’ll see how this plays out.”

The real test of Cuba’s latest experiment will be in how it is implemented and whether work will have a correlation with wealth, Professor Henken and other experts said. Under previous privatization campaigns, he said, “people were so hobbled by regulations that self-employment was rife with illegality and corruption because that’s the only way people could make their businesses float.”

They also had to keep wary, as all Cubans do, of the secret police, given the regime’s attitude toward private property and enterprise in general. Yoani Sánchez, a dissident Cuban blogger, cited this when she wrote the other day: “Under the strict canons of the socialist economy — planned, centralized and subsidized — self-employment has always been seen as an undesirable species of pest that periodically needs to be abated and occasionally even exterminated.”

The result has been the development of a singularly Cuban style of being enterprising — somewhere between furtive and legitimate, with the real object being to simply get along. Ms. Sánchez described one man who runs a restaurant in his house and had outlawed items on his menu. He tried to persuade his daughter to marry a top chef, the blogger wrote, to get around a rule that employees must be family members.

Earlier this month, when Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Fidel Castro for The Atlantic magazine, one comment — hinting that the Cuban system wasn’t working for Cubans any more — drew the most attention. The former president later said that he had been misinterpreted, but within days came the announcement of the layoffs and the opening toward private employment.

Still, none of the power brokers in Cuba were calling this capitalism, and most close observers don’t expect them to use that word, whatever other changes unfold. “Overhauling their model does not necessarily mean they are importing ours,” was the way Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who was at the interview, interpreted Mr. Castro’s comments.

Which brings us back to the matter of public relations, and those billboards: Even their presence could raise issues that Cuba’s economic planners probably have not fully thought through: Is a billboard company legal in the new Cuba? Would residents living along highways be able to rent out the land alongside their home for such advertising?

And, above all, could a privately run restaurant advertise that its rice and beans were better than those offered down the street by the state-run competition?

Cuba: The Bill for the Free Lunch has Arrived

Cuba’s Public-Sector Layoffs Signal Major Shift

September 13, 2010

MEXICO CITY — In perhaps the clearest sign yet that economic change is gathering pace in Cuba, the government plans to lay off more than half a million people from the public sector in the expectation that they will move into private businesses, Cuba’s labor federation said Monday.

Over the past several months, President Raúl Castro has given stern warnings that Cuba’s economy needs a radical overhaul, beginning with its workers. With as many as one million excess employees on the state payroll, Mr. Castro has said, the government is supporting a bloated bureaucracy that has sapped motivation and long sheltered a huge swath of the nation’s workers.

“We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working,” he told the National Assembly last month.

Since permanently taking over from his brother Fidel two years ago, Mr. Castro has often pledged to make Cuba’s centralized, Soviet-style economy more efficient and open up opportunities for people. The government has handed tens of thousands of acres of state-held farmland to private farmers and begun freeing up a market for agricultural supplies. It has loosened restrictions on cellphones and other electronics, and created a few areas for private business, allowing barbers’ shops to become cooperatives and giving more licenses to private taxi drivers.

But these initial reforms have been comparatively limited, many analysts contend, and Cuba’s economy — grappling with the fallout from the global financial crisis and the aftermath of devastating hurricanes in 2008 — appears to be in dire shape.

Tourism revenues have flagged, the country has faced rice shortages and its sugar crop has been disastrous. Last year, as the government tried to hold onto desperately needed hard currency, imports fell by 37 percent.

In its statement Monday, the Cuban Workers’ Central, the country’s only recognized labor federation, openly acknowledged the nation’s troubled economy, saying that changes were “necessary and could not be delayed.”

“Cuba faces the urgency to advance economically,” the statement said. “Our state cannot and should not continue supporting companies” and other state entities, “with inflated payrolls, losses that damage the economy, which are counterproductive, generate bad habits and deform the workers’ conduct,” the labor federation added.

To that end, the government has previously said that it would grant new licenses to entrepreneurs, vastly expanding the kinds of businesses that can be run privately. But the announcement on Monday — saying that the layoffs would be completed by next March — suggested that Mr. Castro now intended to move ahead vigorously.

“What’s stunning today is that they put a date and they put a number on it — 500,000,” said Philip Peters, who follows Cuba for the Lexington Institute. “It’s a very substantial decision,” he added. “It’s a major shift towards a larger private sector in a socialist economy.”

New openings in the private sector would be welcomed by many Cubans, who are weary of the island’s stagnation and desperate for new opportunities.

Even so, the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs — and with them the security of a salary, workplace meals and the chance to make extra money through tips in some cases — would come as a shock.

While Cubans have access to free health care, education and subsidized food and housing, the government has already cut some of the subsidies that many Cubans rely on to supplement their average monthly wage of about $20. And given the government’s record of introducing new areas for enterprise only haltingly, it is unclear that new jobs can be created as quickly as the public sector positions will be cut.

“They are in the process of massively reducing the size and participation of the state in Cuban life,” said Julia E. Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who was in Havana a couple of weeks ago. “There is a belief that there is so much pent-up demand on the one hand and so much skill on the other that the private sector will absorb them pretty rapidly.”

Ms. Sweig said that it appeared the government was preparing to open up a vast range of activities, including light manufacturing like furniture making and garment production. Cuba’s underground economy already provides a broad array of products, she said, but under the new arrangement the government would begin to tax those new businesses.

To absorb all those workers who will be laid off, the federation said that hundreds of thousands were expected to move into some form of private enterprise over the next few years.

Just how strongly the government plans to hold onto its traditional economic philosophies are a matter of debate.

In an interview published online by the Atlantic last week, Fidel Castro said that the Cuban model no longer worked. But in a speech at the University of Havana shortly after his remarks were published, he said that he had been misinterpreted and that what he meant was that capitalism did not work.

Ms. Sweig, who was present for the first interview, said that Mr. Castro’s speech correcting himself was not backtracking. Instead, she said his words were most likely intended to reassure Cubans that he did not intend to import American-style capitalism. “It is a hybrid that is evolving,” she said.

Still, John Kavulich, a senior adviser for the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, warned that it would be difficult for Cuba to follow through on the full scale of its announcement. On a practical level, he asked, would the government be able to import all the tools the new entrepreneurs or small manufacturing cooperatives will need?

There is also a larger question that goes to the heart of Cuba’s ideology, Mr. Kavulich said. “The Cuban government is going to allow and by definition encourage people to go into private sector opportunities,” he said. “What happens when some people get rich?”

“The government is going to have to determine whether it will allow and embrace success, not just opportunity,” he said.

It's Official: Castro admits Cuban Economics are a failure

As if we didn't know. Maybe now Fidel is going to tell the world he was just a young idealist who wanted to give Marxism the old college try before it was too late. Here we are, fifty years down the road, and everyone who's looked at the Cuban model has pronounced it a failure. What else do we need to know?

Should we examine every aspect of the Cuban economy? Should we ask why an island nation sitting in an oil-rich body of water has no oil? Should we ask why this island nation has no fishing industry? Should we ask why a nation capable of producing huge quantities of sugar cane is not in the ethanol business?

We know why. The cost of maintaining a dictatorship is high. It takes a lot to keep a tight squeeze on the necks of 11 million prisoner-citizens. After protecting itself from any hints of opposition, there's no money around to build the nation. Thus, Cuba languishes.

However, by the time the Castros are gone, the biggest land boom of the 21st century will have begun in Havana.

Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work
September 7, 2010

HAVANA – Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

He said Castro made the comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the Middle East, and did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.

Since stepping down from power in 2006, the ex-president has focused almost entirely on international affairs and said very little about Cuba and its politics, perhaps to limit the perception he is stepping on his brother's toes.

Goldberg, who traveled to Cuba at Castro's invitation last week to discuss a recent Atlantic article he wrote about Iran's nuclear program, also reported on Tuesday that Castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, including his recommendation to Soviet leaders that they use nuclear weapons against the United States.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba has clung to its communist system.

The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.

President Raul Castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.

Fidel Castro stepped down temporarily in July 2006 due to a serious illness that nearly killed him.

He resigned permanently two years later, but remains head of the Communist Party. After staying almost entirely out of the spotlight for four years, he re-emerged in July and now speaks frequently about international affairs. He has been warning for weeks of the threat of a nuclear war over Iran.

Castro's interview with Goldberg is the only one he has given to an American journalist since he left office.

Cuba -- To Aid Socialism, is trying Capitalism

This is a switch. To save the socialist/marxist experiment that has been failing in the Caribbean for 50 years, Raul Castro is applying some Capitalism.

Could there be a more direct admission that Fidel's revolution is dead? Meanwhile, it seems as though Obama has taken his cues from the early Fidel Castro, the one who believes the government is the source of all things, that believes the government provides jobs and money to all. But even Cuba knows that sharing is not true caring.

Meanwhile, it is one of those sad facts that Cuba needs handouts to meet its internal needs. Why, though, has Cuba failed to give Brazil the opportunity to build ethanol plants on Cuban soil? Between Cuba's sugar crop and its need for fuel, there's no doubt the country would benefit from making a deal with Brazilian ethanol experts.

Cuba eyes more self-employment as massive layoffs loom

President Raul Castro expanded self-employment fields on Sunday, ahead of looming government plans to slash as many as one million jobs -- 20 percent of communist Cuba's work force -- from state payrolls.

The economy, 95 percent of which is currently in state hands, does not have the ability to absorb such vast numbers of jobless. Castro's move aims to try to reduce the socioeconomic fallout, but it will be an uphill battle.

The Council of Ministers "agreed to expand the range of self-employment jobs, and their use as another alternative for workers who lose their jobs," Castro said as he gave a closing address at one of two annual sessions of the National Assembly.

After the crash of the former Soviet bloc, Cuba's cash-strapped government in the 1990s approved a wide range of self-employment. Positions such as beauticians, dog groomers, small restaurant owners and even lighter refillers were legalized as long as workers got licenses and paid taxes.

But social resentment emerged as an issue when some workers, particularly in small private restaurants, achieved dramatic levels of success.

The government began increasing taxation and regulation, and decreasing license-granting, until the self-employed sector was largely rendered paralyzed, like the rest of the economy.

Cuba has no regular access to international funding; it depends heavily on the cut-rate oil it gets from Venezuela in order to keep its fragile economy afloat. Tourism earnings and remittances from emigres also are key pillars of the Cuban economy.

Inefficiency is rampant and wages are woefully low.

Cubans' hopes had been running high that some change was coming to allow some economic opening in the Americas' only one-party communist regime.

By 2009, there were just 148,000 people out of a work force of five million who were legally self-employed.

Raul Castro, 79, said he would launch new wage and salary practices early next year. He did not give details.

Cuba Libre. The Day is Coming

The Castro brothers are old. And out of touch. The Cuban economy is sinking, something the two old incompetent Marxists can do nothing about.

Maybe Raul will release enough of his political prisoners to convince the US it's time to drop the embargo. Given Obama's desire to appease the world's dictators, it should take very little to satisfy our president. But, then the Cubans living in the US would protest his weakness.

What does a weak president do? Nothing. Too bad for everyone. Too bad for American tourists; too bad for Major League Baseball; and most of all, too bad for the citizens of Cuba.

In Cuba, Revolution Day Without Castro at Podium

Raúl Castro attended a Revolution Day event Monday in Santa Clara but chose not to address the crowd. He delegated the task to his vice president.

Published: July 26, 2010

SANTA CLARA, Cuba — Raúl Castro is known among Cubans as a pragmatist, not an orator. But the Cuban president surprised even those accustomed to his reticence on Monday, when he chose not to address an expectant crowd gathered to celebrate Revolution Day in this university town.

Instead, he delegated the task to the 79-year old vice president, José Ramón Machado Ventura, who appealed for discipline and patience as Cuba tackles economic reforms and condemned the United States for its economic isolation of the island as Mr. Castro applauded from his seat.

“We will go forward, step by step, with a sense of responsibility at our own rhythm, without improvising and without haste,” Mr. Machado said.

Mr. Castro’s choice to not to speak at one of the most important fixtures on the Cuban calendar disappointed some in this central Cuban city. Cubans and officials interviewed Monday said they could not recall an occasion when either Mr. Castro, 79, or his brother, Fidel, 83, did not speak on July 26, when Cubans commemorate the 1953 rebel assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, an event often celebrated here as the birth of the revolution against President Fulgencio Batista.

The decision puzzled Cuba analysts, who thought Mr. Castro might use the occasion to reassert his leadership after his brother’s recent re-emergence into the public sphere after years of seclusion due to illness. Fidel Castro made a separate appearance on Monday in Havana, where he laid a wreath at a memorial for the national hero José Martí.

Some suggested that Raúl Castro, who took over as president in 2008, might be waiting to announce new economic reforms in the more formal setting of the National Assembly, Cuba’s Parliament, when it meets on Sunday.

Cubans weaned on Fidel Castro’s oratorical marathons say they appreciate the terse style of his brother, but many complain that reforms have been slow and say they want to be kept in the loop.

“It’s true he is very practical, but he should give us an idea of where we are going,” Luis Piloto, a theater technician, said after the two-hour, early morning event in a square with a vast monument to Ernesto (Che) Guevara.

The president has made cutting fat from the public sector and increasing agricultural output central to reforms since he succeeded his brother.

The government has leased thousands of hectares of state-held land to private farmers, raised prices paid for produce and agreed to let farmers buy their own supplies instead of having them allocated by the state.

But it has yet to make good on a pledge to cut the agricultural sector’s huge bureaucracy, and problems with distribution and supplies of fertilizer have led to a fall in output this year. Cuba is facing rice shortages and is expecting this year’s sugar crop to be the lowest in more than 100 years, according to state media.

Analysts said Mr. Castro now has to balance the unpopular task of cutting public-sector jobs with creating more opportunities for private enterprise. The Cuban leader has turned some barber shops over to workers and allowed more private taxis.

“Raúl’s message about reform is, ‘This is about becoming more efficient, but making changes in a way that doesn’t cause unrest,’ ” said Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas.

Philip Peters, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a research group in Virginia, said the government could allow retailers to buy supplies wholesale, rather than from expensive state-owned shops, as “a sign of acceptance that these people are part of our economy and we want them to succeed.”

Cuba Libre

We're getting closer. The best way to destroy the Castro regime is to flood the island with Americans bringing good cheer and their capitalist impulses. If Americans are tramping all over the island, Cubans hoping to earn money from them will begin to violate Fidel's communist dictums day and night. No secret police will have the manpower to watch everyone, and the police themselves will fall for the "corrupting" powers of Yankee capitalism.

We would defeat Fidel, Raul and there Marxist state without firing a shot.

Moreover, in Cuba there is a goldmine of untapped baseball talent. Major League Baseball is ready for them. Imagine a big-league stadium in Havana. Considering the daytime temperatures there, the best bet would be a domed stadium.

House panel backs ending travel ban on Cuba

WASHINGTON – A congressional panel voted on Wednesday to lift a decades-old ban on travel to Cuba and remove other hurdles to food sales to the Caribbean island.

The 25-20 vote in the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee sets the stage for a potentially blistering debate this year in both the full House and the Senate.

"We have tried isolating Cuba for more than fifty years and it has not worked," House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson said. "Today's vote demonstrates that Congress is ready to change our nation's approach on this issue."

A broad coalition of farm, business and human rights group have backed the bipartisan bill as an important step toward ending the almost five-decade-old embargo on communist-led Cuba and promoting positive change on the island.

"By increasing food exports and repealing the travel ban, this legislation will provide more jobs for Americans and Cubans," said Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, an advocacy group.

But opponents, who say Washington must keep pressure on Cuba's communist government to force democratic change, vowed to use every tool available to keep it from becoming law.

Representative Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican, called the bill the latest U.S. government bailout program.

"Only this time we'd be bailing out a brutal dictatorship on the brink of collapsing," Rooney said.

Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said he would filibuster any attempt to pass the bill in the Senate.

"The big corporate interests behind this bill couldn't care less about whether the Cuban people are free or not. They only care about padding their profits," Menendez, whose parents where Cuban immigrants, said.

Proposals to lift the ban have died in Congress over the last decade due to concerns about human rights abuses in the one-party state built since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.

President Barack Obama has taken some steps to improve relations with Havana, such as allowing unlimited family travel and remittances and greater telecommunications links.

But Washington says the Cuban government has failed to reciprocate, making it politically difficult for the White House to move further in easing the Cold War-era embargo.

Cuban officials have encouraged recent U.S. trade delegations visiting Havana to work to abolish the travel ban because the arrival of more American tourists would give the government more money to buy U.S. goods.

Congress exempted farm sales from the long-standing U.S. embargo on Cuba in 2000 as long as Havana paid in cash and money transfers were handled by a third-country bank.

President George W. Bush's administration angered many farm-state lawmakers by interpreting the cash payment rule narrowly, insisting on payment before shipment.

The bill addresses that issue.

U.S. farm exports to Cuba reached a record $710 million in 2008, before dropping to $528 million in 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis.