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Cuba

This might look like what China did when it opened its economy. But Cuba is not China.

My guess–and it is just a guess– is that the biggest industries will remain under state control. Other businesses will be privatised, some will be partially privatised. If this opening allows the state to accumulate capital through taxes and maintain its good healthcare system and improve others., the lives of a few Cubans will improve. 

Cuba needs a modern transport system and renovation of hundreds of thousands of homes, for example. Carts and camiones are used as means of transport, the Internet is not affordable to everyone, schools needs pencils, many flats in Havana are derelict, etc, etc. That’s just some of what I witnessed in my visit in 2015. And it is definitely not a communist economy or a communist country as it is always portrayed. All what the country has is some socialistic elements.

Cuba already has a small private sector. A Spanish luxury hotel chain, private restaurants, small shops, casas particulares rent to foreigners/tourists... and inequality is visible among Cubans. The opening will not necessarily benefit many Cubans. China’s experience with private businesses has proven it. It will depend on the new power relations between the regime and the capitalists in terms of laws and regulations, especially in the absence of independent trade unions.

At the end, it is a success for the criminals in Washington and all those who have been complicit in the decades-long embargo on a small, poor island. It is a gate for foreign capital to use cheap labour. With foreign capital, new cars will enter the country, the song of the middle class is the driver of consumption and “democracy” will be accompanied by saxophones of “political reform” in the Western corporate media.

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