Posted on 09/17/2010 7:09:23 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The word from on high in Havana shook the entire island. President Raul Castro had decided that Cuba's economy needs to be fundamentally restructured and, as a first step, 500,000 state workers are going to be laid-off by next spring. The government employs 90% of the country's more than 5 million workers and so Castro's stripping of what Cuba's official labor union described as "inflated payrolls" is sending shock waves through all of Cuban society.
Some Cubans, however, sees opportunity in the uncertainty - especially in the President's declaration that private enterprise must take up the slack and absorb the newly unemployed.
For those who can't get a job in the private sector or retire comfortably, there is another recourse: leaving Cuba. Milton, 34, an official tourist guide, his hoping to start his own business, but is considering alternatives as well. "They will have to let us know what we can do, how much the licenses [to set up a business] will cost and if we have to pay taxes." Otherwise, he is thinking of moving abroad. "I am in line for a visa for the States," says Milton. "My family lives there. But if can open a business I will rather stay here. Life, they tell me, is very hard in the States."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
ya mean
you don’t say
but but but
that’s
capitalism!
The tagline never lies.
My guess is that Castro will dump the extra people over here again.
So communism doesn’t work! Somebody please tell the current user of the oval office.
Yep. All the way to the TIME news desk.
This has got to be the longest-running series of satire threads ever. This isn’t really happening.
I’m curious whether a liberated Cuba will become a Singapore or a Haiti.
Last time he opened his prisons, insane asylums and those too worthless to work. And sent them to South Florida on inner tubes.
That sure didn’t help out South Florida and It is getting past time they can come on them again til next year. Ocean will be too rough.
And you know Cuba has at least that many they’d like to unload again.
I’m bettin’ “Singapore.” Cubans are a party just waiting to happen. Five years from now, they’ll all be saying “WHAT WERE WE THINKING?” as communism dies a well-deserved death, and Cuba becomes a jewel of the Caribbean.
Productivity will soar ;the worry is if the people are “too successful” the communists will re-nationalize everything.
Thanks and I hope you’re correct!
I have no doubt that the scumbag communist Ubama has no interest in learning anything from communism’s latest failure.
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
but, but....but, all of our Senior Intelligence Analysts kept telling us that even when Castro goes to that big Communal Sugar Field in the sky, Cuba will not embrace freedom because there are simply too many party hacks with a vested interest in the Communist system who cannot be disposed of.....
I have no doubt that the scumbag communist Ubama has no interest in learning anything from communism’s latest failure.
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Their answer is always the same. The brightest, sharpest have not been given a proper chance of running it yet. And “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”.
It’s NOT liberated as long as the unelected Castros remain in power.
You (not just you, but everyone on FR) have no idea of what it’s like in Cuba. There is no infrastructure. The phones don’t work. There is hardly a working toilet in the city of Havana, a place that was once called the Paris of the Caribbean.For years it has been almost impossible to buy things like an iron, scissors, cooking utensils. After 50 years of totalitarianism, the people do not know how to think. They don’t understand the principles of capitalism that an 8 year old with a lemonade stand understands. They have almost no information about the outside world. Haiti is Singapore compared to Cuba.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. What you’re saying is a shallow projection of your experience here, and has no bearing on the reality of Cuba. This isn’t a fairy tale where after 50 years of being in a coma the princ kisses the princess and the kingdom comes back to life as if nothing happened. The infrastructure has been demolished, and worse, the minds of the people have been destroyed. This is an illiterate population who do not know how to think. They have no inofrmation about the outside world, and no ability to make normal, everyday common sense decisions. There are still hundreds of political prisoners endruing unspeakable torutres evena as I type this.
Cuba is like a person who has been kidnapped, kept in a dark room, raped repatedly for years and been turned into a crack whore — and then someone takes her outside and says “She used to be beautiful, and now in no time at all she will be Miss America and the CEO of a corporation. Not going to happen. Or, in the words of a popular regrain, “platano maduro no vuelve verde, tiempo que ya paso no vuelve” (ripe plantains don’t turn green, time that’s passed can’t be found).
I’m sad to say that they are right. It’s way past Castro — it’s a cancer that has metastasized into every cell of the entire body. Cuba will neer be free, not because of Castro, but because communist cuba is a cornerstone in the edifice of the Left, and the world wants Cuba to remain enslaved.
The American businesses that want to open there aren’t interested in Cuba’s freedom — they are interested in slave labor and maintaining Cuba as the plantation that it is.
You don’t know what it’s like there. Letting ignorant,frightened people with no physical or intellectual or moral resources loose to “work” in a country with no infrastructure is not going to create freedom or capitalism, any more than the freed slaves of the 1870s who became sharecroppers created anything. Blacks learned about freedom and commerce in the great migration to the north.
Productivity will not soar, because there is nothing there — but you are right that if anything does come of this, the gov’t will take it back again.
Bear in mind that this is not the first time that something like this has happened in the castro regime — there have been repeated “thaws” where they have allowed farmers to sell onions frown on their own land (as opposed to be put in prison for selling opnions) and after a short time Castro would denounce them as pirates and speculators and it was back to saquare one again.
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