The Cuban model

The Cuban model
By Nick Miroff
Created September 13, 2010 14:24

What Fidel Castro — and everyone else — knows is broken.

HAVANA, Cuba — Since his off-the-cuff comment that "the Cuban model
doesn't even work for us anymore," Fidel Castro has tried to retract
that statement and prevent its rapid spread across the internet.

The remark [2] was misinterpreted by the visiting reporter Jeffery
Goldberg of the Atlantic, Castro insists, claiming what he really meant
was the opposite: it's Washington's free-market model that wouldn't work
for Cuba.

That explanation was not only unsatisfying — it also didn't really make
sense. While Castro's statement may not have been the endorsement of
free-market economics that some were eager to interpret it as, it also
defies logic that when the commandante combined the words "Cuban model,"
"doesn't work" and "anymore," he was somehow talking about global
capitalism.

So what was Castro really trying to say? Was it a spontaneous,
unfiltered observation? A misstatement? A casual aside he didn't expect
to see in print?

A more plausible interpretation is that Castro was simply stating
something that many here have been saying for some time, including his
younger brother and successor Raul: the Cuban government needs to fix
its socialist model [3] to stay afloat.

As Cuba expert Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relation said to
Goldberg, who'd asked her for clarification, Castro "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," she
said.

Castro, then, may have been simply endorsing the limited economic
reforms [4] initiated by his brother, easing state control over
agriculture and allowing for the creation of worker-run cooperatives and
more small-scale private enterprise [5].

While those reforms hardly represent major changes, they have been
accompanied by an unprecedented public debate about the island's
economic shortcomings, with growing calls for more free-market
liberties. The discussions have featured relatively frank criticisms [6]
of Cuba's onerous bureaucracy, including the cradle-to-grave
entitlements that are basic to the island's socialist model but
increasingly unaffordable for the cash-strapped government.

As Raul Castro sees it, that old model is exhausted. As he recently said
in a speech, "We have to permanently erase the notion that Cuba is the
only country in the world where you can live without working."

On Monday, Cuba's state-run media announced that the government intends
to lay off or reassign 500,000 workers by mid-2011. Castro said there
are a million excess employees on state payrolls, and that the
government will continue to make adjustments to the island's socialist
system. By creating new opportunities for small-scale business ventures
and cooperatives, Castro's goal is to spur productivity by encouraging
entrepreneurship, while keeping Cuba's aspiring business class on a
tight leash and avoiding missteps.

Part of his challenge will be to find ways to formally recognize the
black-market economy [7] that already exists. Unlicensed, informal
businesses operate all over the island, run by Cubans who sell imported
clothing, fix air conditioners or bake pastries. By bringing those
businesses out of the shadows with regulation and taxation, the
government could soften the blow of the large-scale layoffs in the
public sector.

Another widely recognized failure of the Cuban model — and a potential
source of new jobs — is the island's woeful agricultural sector. Cuba
imports roughly 70 percent of its food, creating a huge financial burden
for the government, which guarantees a basic ration with about two
weeks' worth of food for every man, woman and child on the island,
regardless of income.

To boost local production, Raul Castro began giving out idle state-owned
land two years ago to enterprising Cubans willing to try their hand at
farming [8]. Since then, the government has approved the applications of
more than 100,000 "usufructarios" who receive free, 10-year leases on
the land. After selling a portion of their harvest to the government at
state-set prices, the farmers can sell the rest of their produce at a
profit.

The program has yet to deliver the production growth that the Castro
government has hoped for, and farmers say there are still too many
restrictions on where they can sell and to whom. Tractors, fertilizer
and farming implements remain scarce, and the government needs to make
those basic tools more available, critics say.

But throughout the Cuban countryside, there are also encouraging signs
of change.

On the outskirts of the town of Bejucal, 20 miles south of Havana,
47-year-old Lorenzo Ramos received a five-acre plot last year and went
to work as a farmer. His land was strewn with trash, having been used
for years as an informal dump, and it was choked with the ubiquitous
African weed known as marabu.

Ramos went to work with an ax, a machete and an old Soviet-era tractor,
and today his plot is lined with fruit tree saplings, sweet potatoes and
other crops. A bulldozer crew provided by the government is helping
Ramos dig out a fish pond where he plans to raise tilapia.

New reforms announced last month will allow Ramos and others like him to
set up fruit-and-vegetable stands where they can sell their wares
directly to consumers.

"If you don't have money, you can't live," said Ramos, standing in his
fields on a recent afternoon.

The logic echoed his president's words, but the sentiment was
nonetheless new to Cuban socialism. "Someone has to produce things
here," he said. "We have to save this country.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/cuba/100913/cuba-socialism-castro-reforms