September 8, 2010

Even Castro Doesn't Believe in Communism Anymore

From the Associated Press wire:

HAVANA – Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work [...]

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.

On Cuba, 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.

Little wonder, after sixty years to trying that, the country is desolately poor and backward and even Fidel Castro can't pretend otherwise.

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