Well, have a heart, he's only been in the job for 40 years and when you are the capo di capi with a huge bureaucracy beneath you getting in the way of you and your people it is sometimes hard to discern what's really going on. I mean, the rest of the world, or at least, those prosperous parts of it with liberty and fairly free markets, might have been teling you the truth for 40 years but, well, you know, you have to beware the propaganda. And all those stories of boatloads of Cubans risking their lives to paddle across the Gulf to reach America, well, everyone knew they were just fisherman who got lost. Anyway, it's nice to know that good ol' Fidel has finally seen the light:
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog. (My emphasis)
Hardly surprising given that:
The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.
Needless to say, despite the, er, propaganda, the health care, the education, the transportation and the housing are crap just like you would expect from any government. Still, at long last the penny peso has dropped!
Thanks to Breitbart news.
Can you actually imagine what is signified by the statement "monthly income of $20"? This, for virtually anyone reading, is barely fathomable. For UK readers, that's about 12 pounds 50 a month, at a 1.6:1 exchange rate (might not be strictly accurate, but it's ballpark.) That is forty pence a day. If a couple of 20p coins spilt from your hand and rolled into a culvert, how upset, and for how long, would you be? Mildly, and momentarily, at most. Now imagine: the people who have set themselves atop of you as your absolute lords and masters have so arranged things that those two pitiful specie represent your entire purchasing power for a day. Lose a penny, lose tuppence, and it's a big deal.
In 1974 I and my five year old friends were scandalised when the price of a Mars Bar went from 6p to 8p. Polos doubled: from tuppence to fourpence. Now imagine feeding your family of four on the price of ten packets of Polos a day. This is evil incarnate. Merely to posit the existence of a system wherein such evil could dwell is to summon the gathering gloom, to beckon the leathery flap of bat wings as the darkness encroaches.
Communists should be burnt at the stake only after having been cheerfully and ostentatiously viscerated. Cuban communism is evil, and so are all its supporters.
Posted by: David Gillies | Friday, 10 September 2010 at 11:42
Well illustrated, David, and whilst there is some slight excuse, stupidity being congenital in the human race, for the early communists believing their own tripe, there is absolutely no excuse for the contemporary believers who have seen throughout the last century that anywhere and everywhere that a communist regime takes over the result is penury and enslavement for its people. As this has been going on since 1917, excuses along the lines of 'oh well, they were never real communists' are wafer thin.
Posted by: David Duff | Friday, 10 September 2010 at 12:00
You need an update here. Castro now says that Goldberg misunderstood, and what he actually meant just the opposite, something like "The Cuban model is so good it should be exported." Even Goldberg is confused.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fidel-tries-to-wiggle-out-of-one/62826/
Posted by: Dom | Monday, 13 September 2010 at 18:58
Sounds like Fidel had sampled one too many of those deadly Cuban cocktails! In vino veritas, or however they say that in Spanish.
Posted by: David Duff | Monday, 13 September 2010 at 20:22