If one lives long enough, and pays a bit of attention, all manner of wondrous events can occur.
In this case, we have Fidel and Raoul Castro, each in their own way, admitting that the socialist state they erected, enforced (generously propped up with Russian money), built a police state for, and attempted to export at the point of the gun for the past fifty or so years is, in fact, an abject failure.
They, in contrast to Our Beloved Leader, are laying off government employees in large numbers--500,000 on the first round, with more to come. They are encouraging the formation of small businesses, and beginning to take their boot-heel off the neck of the country.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Cuba will lay off more than half a million state workers and try to create hundreds of thousands of private-sector jobs, a dramatic attempt by the hemisphere's only Communist country to shift its nearly bankrupt economy toward a more market-oriented system.
The mass layoffs will take place between now and the end of March, according to a statement issued Monday by the Cuban Workers Federation, the island nation's only official labor union. Workers will be encouraged to find jobs in Cuba's tiny private sector instead.
"Our state can't keep maintaining...bloated payrolls," the union's statement said. More than 85% of Cuba's 5.5 million workers are employed by the state.
Well, cut my legs off and call me Shorty! Obamanomics, modeled on Fidel-o-nomics, sucks, creates poverty, malaise, and despair. And the government of the Worker's Paradise admits it! Within a couple of years, OS predicts the only remaining socialist true believers left in the US will reside in the White House, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkley, Plains Georgia, and Miz Nancy's and Mr. Harry's unsold autobiographies in the sale bins of discount bookstores in strip malls.
Hell's-Bells, ya'll! Even Fidel admitted it to Jeff Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly last month. In the presence of credible witnesses, unprompted and unbidden:
Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn't say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat - it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.
"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he said.
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, "Never mind"?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, "He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country."
Game, set, match. Stick a fork in it, Betty-Lou, 'cuz I think it's done. Someone get on the phone to Himself, and let him know he better come up with some other plausible verbiage to spout, 'cuz what he's saying now won't pass the laugh test no more.
Now, if they could just get around to freeing the remaining political prisoners, and let Chavez know...
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