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...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51