NM's blog

A good article by Julia Neima. The following are excerpts only. Access to the full article requires a subscription . Cuba is undergoing its biggest economic transformation in decades: private firms are back and small businesses employ a quarter of the workforce. But market reform has brought no political opening. TaTamanía is Cuba’s first private care home, which opened this spring in the capital’s Vedado district. This type of business was long prohibited under the revolution, but in recent years, a lack of resources has left public care facilities in a critical state. The economic, commercial and financial vice is tightening as Washington expands the scope of its sanctions…  Trump’s strategy is to throttle the state monopoly and force the Cuban government to allow a private sector to develop. This challenge has caused major upheaval in what has until recently been one of the world’s most state-controlled economies.  The agricultural reform of 1959, the sweeping nationalisati...

Cuba: a tiny island nation that upset U.S. hegemony through the power of example. Even as a revolutionary, Castro often spoke in radical-liberal tones about freedom, about democracy, about the rule of law. He insisted that these values could not be realized without the economic justice of state-distributed medicine, of education, of collective ownership of Cuban energy and utilities. “We haven’t chosen this struggle,” said El Presidenté while wearing military fatigues and brandishing a rifle in 1967; “It’s been imposed on us.” As a statesman, Castro was at his best when he asserted how socialism was needed to achieve the liberal ideals that were stymied under free-market capitalism. At the same time, El Presidenté was at his worst as a dictator who ruled undemocratically. The customary military fatigues; the strident hours-long speeches; the greying beard: by the end of the 20th century, they all appeared the gamey trappings of an aging autocrat. Same-sex relations were officially decr...

“ Western governments don’t have to do much to make the world a better place — in fact, all they have to do is stop what they’re doing.” I wonder why though one has to conclude an article with an indirect appeal to those very same regimes they condemn. US sanctions killing Afghans

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