John Moran: Cuba Embarks on a New Revolution
[John Moran is an Irish Times journalist just returned from several weeks in Cuba.]
Cubans have entered a period of dramatic change with enormous implications for economic, political and social aspects of their lives, perhaps not seen since the collapse of Cuba’s old sponsor, the USSR.
With that cataclysmic break-up in the early 1990s, some 85 per cent of the Caribbean island’s income vanished, marking the start of a period of extreme hardship remembered bitterly as the Periodo Especial .
Not least among the changes now deemed necessary to deal with the country’s troubled economy by President Raul Castro is the laying off of 500,000 state employees between this month and the end of March. Effectively, this ends Cuba’s official policy of full state employment, with some commentators saying these changes could even mark the beginning of the end of the 50-year socialist economic experiment for the country’s 12 million people.
The demise of communism and the Castro brothers, Raul and Fidel, however, have been predicted many times before – indeed their deaths were once reported in a US newspaper by an Irish-American journalist in 1956 shortly after they had landed in Cuba from Mexico with a small group to begin the final phase of the revolution.
Despite the scale and scope of the proposed changes, however, President Castro is anxious to insist that the essential nature of the last communist state in the western hemisphere will not itself change...
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Cubans have entered a period of dramatic change with enormous implications for economic, political and social aspects of their lives, perhaps not seen since the collapse of Cuba’s old sponsor, the USSR.
With that cataclysmic break-up in the early 1990s, some 85 per cent of the Caribbean island’s income vanished, marking the start of a period of extreme hardship remembered bitterly as the Periodo Especial .
Not least among the changes now deemed necessary to deal with the country’s troubled economy by President Raul Castro is the laying off of 500,000 state employees between this month and the end of March. Effectively, this ends Cuba’s official policy of full state employment, with some commentators saying these changes could even mark the beginning of the end of the 50-year socialist economic experiment for the country’s 12 million people.
The demise of communism and the Castro brothers, Raul and Fidel, however, have been predicted many times before – indeed their deaths were once reported in a US newspaper by an Irish-American journalist in 1956 shortly after they had landed in Cuba from Mexico with a small group to begin the final phase of the revolution.
Despite the scale and scope of the proposed changes, however, President Castro is anxious to insist that the essential nature of the last communist state in the western hemisphere will not itself change...