La vía cubana al capitalismo

Diario de Cuba

Fernando Mires

'Hay quienes creen que con el acercamiento de EEUU a Cuba, el auge de un capitalismo dependiente llevará a la disolución de la clase militar dominante. No hay razones para pensar así.'

Alguna vez habrá que teorizar acerca del tema. Lo cierto es que hasta ahora todas las vías proclamadas para la construcción del socialismo han culminado en la construcción del capitalismo donde este no existía, o existía sobre fundamentos muy primarios.

Aunque no guste a los marxistas ortodoxos, el socialismo hasta ahora ha sido solo la expresión del fenómeno que Hegel denominaba "astucia de la razón". Como es sabido, según Hegel la razón de la historia no se rige por la de sus actores sino por una lógica suprahumana (Lecciones para una Filosofía de la Historia Universal). En sentido hegeliano, el socialismo como medio para la construcción del capitalismo también sería una astucia de la razón histórica.

Ya Lenin en 1920 a través de la NEP (Nueva Política Económica) levantó la tesis de que la tarea del "partido del proletariado" debería ser desarrollar el capitalismo de Estado en la URSS hasta el momento en que las fuerzas productivas estuvieran tan evolucionadas como en los países del "capitalismo avanzado".

El socialismo fue así concebido por Lenin como la fase capitalista del comunismo (idea que nunca pasó por la cabeza de Marx). La llamada "nomenklatura" sería la clase dominante del capitalismo estatal soviético.

El Partido Comunista chino siguió esa lección. Durante Mao tuvo lugar un proceso forzado de "acumulación originaria" (Smith, Marx) que sentaría las bases para el desarrollo de un agresivo capitalismo estatal. La primicia fue que, en lugar de estatizar todo, como hizo Stalin, la nomenklatura china abrió un espacio de reproducción del capital en donde sus actores gozan de amplias libertades económicas.

Bajo la protección del Estado "comunista" han aparecido en China magnates a quienes son otorgadas facilidades para su enriquecimiento pero bajo la condición de no cuestionar jamás a la clase dominante organizada en el Partido.

Dicho sin ironía: en China, en nombre del socialismo, ha sido creado un capitalismo perfecto. Un capitalismo sin derechos humanos, sin movimientos sociales y sin huelgas. No extraña así que muchos tecnócratas occidentales se sientan fascinados por el modelo chino. El socialismo chino no es el paraíso de los trabajadores pero sí es, o ha llegado a ser, el de los capitalistas.

En el modelo chino Raúl Castro encontró una posibilidad de sobrevivencia para la clase dominante cubana y de igual modo intenta crear las bases para un —así lo llamaremos—  "capitalismo concesionario". Pero hay dos diferencias. Una: mientras en China el núcleo del Estado está formado por una burocracia muy eficiente, en Cuba está formado por el Ejército. En Cuba el Partido es el Ejército y el Ejército es el Estado.

La segunda diferencia es más importante: mientras en China el lugar de la reproducción del capital es ocupado por un empresariado nacional, en Cuba es y será ocupado por el capital internacional, particularmente en la industria turística.

No obstante, la condición para el  surgimiento de un "capitalismo concesionario" es la misma en ambos casos. Las libertades regirán en la economía pero no en la política. Y eso significa lo siguiente: el poder de la nomenklatura cubana no deberá ser cuestionado.

Hay quienes creen que con el acercamiento de EEUU a Cuba, el auge de un capitalismo dependiente llevará a la disolución de la clase militar dominante. No hay razones para pensar así. El capitalismo no tiene contradiciones "naturales" con ningún sistema político. Puede funcionar tan bien o tan mal en naciones fascistas como en naciones comunistas.

Eso quiere decir que las libertades políticas no serán instauradas en Cuba por concesiones económicas al "capital". Esas libertades solo serán posibles gracias a la lucha democrática de sus ciudadanos. No hay otra posibilidad.

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Fernando Mires, chileno, es profesor jubilado de Política Internacional de la Universidad de Oldenburg, Alemania.

Friedrich Hayek and the Future of Liberty

The Independent Institute

Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) left such a profound mark on economic and political thought that The New Yorker has called the 20th century, "The Hayek Century." After converting to free-market capitalism and classical liberalism in the 1920s, Hayek became one of socialism's and statism's staunchest critics. His 1944 bestseller, The Road to Serfdom, warned of central government planning's authoritarian, and even totalitarian, tendencies- and helped reignite worldwide interest in the philosophy and practice of freedom. Although Hayek's 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Science brought renewed interest in his ideas, it wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc (which Hayek predicted) that his vast writings on economics, political philosophy, law, history, culture, and other fields became broadly recognized as essential to achieve a prosperous, humane and free society. Biographer Alan Ebenstein and economist Charles Baird shed light on Hayek's seminal legacy and the rebirth of freedom.

Hong Kong Vs Cuba. Capitalism Vs Socialism.

Bruce On Politics

Let’s get started with a quick recap:

Capitalism. Under this system an organisation can only survive in the market by looking after the customer. By delivering goods or services of the right quality at the right time at the right price. Otherwise they go bust.

Socialism. Under this system the state directs what goods and services will be delivered, what their quality will be and also the price. This cannot possibly exist in a market because competition would kill it, so monopolies are essential for it to function. Such organisations exist for the benefit of the state, not the customers. They cannot go bust because they can fix prices and rely on the state for subsidies of taxpayers money.

Now let’s look at what assets and strengths Cuba has to enrich their people with:

• Its people. 11 million very well educated people. Their literacy and numeracy rate is better than Britain’s. Number 5 in the UN Education index.
• Incredibly verdant and productive agriculture. Rich soil and a tropical climate combine to allow several crops per year.
• Nickel and Cobalt. There are 5.5 million tons of Nickel waiting to be mined, 7% of the world total.
• Oil. Cuba is an oil producer and known reserves of 20 billion barrels, one of the top 20 reserves in the world.
• Tourism. Cuba is an idyllic tropical paradise with amazing beaches.

Contrast and compare with what Hong Kong has to offer:

• Seven million educated people. Number 87 in the UN Education index.
• A great harbour.
• Nothing else.

As you can see Cuba has Hong Kong well beaten.

Cuba was capitalist until 1959, when Castro took over. So let’s have look at how things were then.

• 80% of the landmass was under cultivation or used for grazing. Cuba was second only to Brazil in exporting agricultural products to USA.
• Cuba’s real per capita income was $378, fourth in Latin America. Spain ($324) and Portugal ($212), were both lower.
• The share of national income paid to workers was 65 percent, only Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. were higher.

Now lets look how Hong Kong was doing (the then colony deliberately didn’t gather data and statistics!):

• After WW2 HK had a population of just 600,000, during the 1950s there was a immense influx of refugees from China. 100,000 a month came till the population exceeded 3 million. Many lived in shanty towns.
• With nothing for all these people to do the British colonial masters started manufacturing projects to make simple, low cost items like buttons, plastic items, umbrellas, artificial flowers etc.

Once again you can see Cuba has Hong Kong well beaten.

From this basis the two economies took different courses. Socialist Cuba couldn’t produce sugar competitively against world prices. They were rescued by the Soviet Union who bought the entire sugar crop at subsidised prices so as to keep Cuba afloat. When the Soviet Union imploded this stopped and 100,000 sugar workers lost their jobs. Visit Cuba today and great swathes of fertile farmland lie unused. Much else in the economy was also trashed as huge socialist inefficiencies stopped anything working properly. There was very little investment in buildings or infrastructure. Cuba now and is mostly frozen in a 1959 timewarp, but in a state of decay and disrepair.

In 1961 a Britain, John James Cowperthwaite, became financial secretary of Hong Kong, which was still a very poor. He invented and implemented “positive non interventionism” a highly libertarian management of the economy. This worked like magic and between 1961 and 1997 Hong Kong’s gross domestic product grew to be 180 times bigger. Everyone who lived in Hong Kong was free to do anything they wanted. There was minimum tax and minimum government. Enterprise, investment, risk taking, entrepreneurship were everywhere. Success was rewarded. Hong Kong became the most dynamic economy in the world.

So how are things today in Hong Kong:

• Economic freedom score is 90.1, making it the top-rated economy in the Index for the 20th consecutive year.
• This small country has the world’s 8th largest trading economy.
• World Bank GDP/capita (PPP) $ 53,203 rating the country 9th in the world.
• 124,000 millionaires (calculated  excluding primary residence). Number growing at 27% per annum, the highest rate in the world.
• Number 15 on the world corruption index with a score of 75 (UK 76).
• Basic income tax rate of 2%. Top rate 17% on income over HK$ 120,000.

And in Cuba:

• Economic freedom score is 28.7, making its economy one of the world’s least free.
• World Bank GDP/capita (PPP) $ 18,796 rating the country 60th in the world.
• The main millionaire on Cuba is Fidel Castro with a fortune of $900 million stolen from the people.
• Number 63 on the world corruption index with a score of 46.

So there you have the irrefutable facts. Socialism is utterly disgusting and immoral, it damages the lives of everyone it touches except those at the very top who become enormously rich. Capitalism, unfettered. delivers incredible results. It enable anyone to become very rich who wants to. All they have to do is provide customers with what they want. This is by far the most moral form of human organisation.

Critics say that Hong Kong is small and that such measures cannot be applied to a big economy. They are wrong. China looked at what Hong Kong was doing and it was copied there by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. We have all seen the meteoric growth in the Chinese economy since then.

Other critics say that Cuba’s economy was held back by being embargoed by its regional superpower, the USA. They forget that Hong Kong was also embargoed by its regional superpower, China.

The system of having minimum government is called a Night Watchman State, economist advocates call it minarchism. It allows maximum human freedom, people can build their lives undisturbed by government extortion, they take responsibility for themselves. It also ensure the maximum competition when you spend your money as a customer. So you get better goods and services at better prices. Everyone in society wins.

Given the evidence it is amazing that every country has not done this. It is also utterly beyond belief that anyone can be stupid enough to vote for a socialist government. Socialism is our enemy.

Remember. Capitalism pays for all the other -isms!

Los 70 años de 'Camino de Servidumbre'

El Blog de Montaner

Carlos Alberto Montaner

uel-peru.blogspot.com

Hace exactamente 70 años el economista austriaco Friedrich Hayek publicó Camino de servidumbre. El libro, un best seller en su tiempo, conserva (casi) toda su vigencia en esta América Latina nuestra que no aprende de sus errores ni olvida sus peores comportamientos. Tres décadas después de publicar su obra más conocida, la academia sueca le otorgó el Premio Nobel de Economía en 1974.

¿Qué dijo Hayek en su famoso libro? Algo muy importante: que la planificación centralizada por el Estado va en contra de las libertades y del progreso. Nos empobrece espiritual y materialmente.

¿Por qué? En esencia, aunque no lo explicó Hayek de esa manera, porque la libertad es el ejercicio pleno de la facultad que tenemos de tomar decisiones y construir con ellas nuestras vidas de acuerdo con nuestros valores, intereses y querencias.

Cuando el Estado decide por nosotros lo que supuestamente nos conviene, además de empobrecernos, nos genera un profundo malestar. Ese tipo de Estado deja de ser un conjunto de instituciones a nuestro servicio y bajo nuestras órdenes, y pasa a convertirse en nuestro amo y señor. Nos somete a la más vil servidumbre.

Sucedió en Cuba, como ha ocurrido siempre en los Estados totalitarios, cuando el gobierno estableció los libros que debíamos leer y los que debían ser destruidos. Cuando unos revolucionarios iluminados decidieron las verdades que ya habían sido establecidas y hasta el modo en que nos debíamos ganar la vida.

Incluso, escogieron las personas a las que debíamos querer o detestar, como ocurrió cuando se dio la orden de interrumpir los lazos con los “gusanos” que habían abandonado el país y se rompieron parejas, y padres, hijos y hermanos dejaron de hablarse. O cuando se persiguió a los homosexuales porque el Estado, cruelmente, había hecho metástasis a la zona afectiva y había decidido controlar las emociones de las personas para hacerlas felices y obligatoriamente “normales” mediante la reeducación que se lograba maltratándolas en los campos de caña.

Al margen de lo que Hayek escribió en Camino de servidumbre, hay un elemento esencial que mantiene la vigencia de la obra siete décadas después de haberse publicado. Del texto se desprende el rol que debe desempeñar el Estado en su relación con la sociedad, y, sobre todo, el que no debe jugar porque todos acabamos perjudicados.

No es verdad que el Estado, una entelequia manejada por personas, como todas, que tienen sus intereses, preferencias y clientelas políticas, es capaz de definir el “bien común” y actuar eficientemente y con sentido de la justicia. Lo demostró otro Premio Nobel de economía de la misma cuerda de Hayek, James M. Buchanan, con sus estudios sobre la “elección pública”.

No es verdad que el Estado debe elegir "triunfadores” y “fracasados” o asumir la función de repartidor de bienes para igualar los resultados del trabajo. Suele hacerlo mal, distorsiona y reduce el proceso de creación de riquezas y demoniza los logros económicos como si fueran actos vergonzosos.

Entre las decisiones sesgadas de los funcionarios convertidos en comisarios, supuestamente transformados en píos agentes de una improbable justicia social, y el mercado, conformado por las decisiones libres de millones de personas, el mejor resultado, el que suele conducir al desarrollo y eleva el nivel de vida de toda la sociedad, es el que se deriva del mercado que es, sin duda, una expresión de la libertad.

Al principio de esta nota subrayé que Camino de servidumbre conserva casi toda su vigencia. ¿En qué falla? Tal vez en suponer que el socialismo conduce inevitablemente al totalitarismo. No siempre es cierto. Los socialistas inteligentes aprenden de la experiencia y pueden rectificar.

Lo hicieron los suecos ante la crisis económica de los años noventa provocada por los excesos del Estado de Bienestar. Termino con un párrafo de Mauricio Rojas, un chileno del socialismo carnívoro que llegó a Suecia exiliado tras el golpe de Pinochet, allí adquirió un doctorado en economía, evolucionó intelectual y emocionalmente, y llegó a ser miembro del parlamento sueco representando al partido de los liberales.

Dice Rojas, hoy de regreso en Chile, muy preocupado por las medidas que está tomando la señora Bachelet:

“Sería muy lamentable emprender un camino, el del gran Estado-patrón, que otros han tenido que desandar. Se puede construir un Estado del bienestar distinto, que una la fuerza creativa de la competencia, la diversidad y el capitalismo con un profundo compromiso solidario, pero para ello no hay que dejarse llevar por las consignas de quienes creen tener la razón por el simple hecho de gritar más alto”.
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José Manuel González

Dalai Lama: A ‘Marxist’s’ new respect for capitalism

AEIdeas
American Enterprise Institute

The pope, capitalism and the far left - O'Reilly

Arianna Huffington Pushes 'Better Version of Capitalism'

breitbart

By Wynton Hall 

www.nytimes.com

Arianna Huffington, Richard Branson, and twelve other CEOs and past business executives are uniting in an effort to remake free enterprise by creating a “better version of capitalism, one that prioritizes people and planet over profit.”

The new group calls itself “the B team.”

“Plan A—the pursuit of short-term profit at the exclusion of everything else—isn’t working for anyone,” writes Huffington. “This is a moment of great possibility and opportunity for all of us to play our part in course-correcting, and leveraging the best parts of the spirit of business and entrepreneurship to bring about fundamental changes to the ways we do business—for the benefit of individuals, communities, and companies.”

Huffington’s involvement in the group’s effort to alter capitalism by putting people ahead of profits is likely to recall the 2011 progressive uproar that occurred when Huffington leveraged the work of her mostly unpaid thousands of bloggers and cashed out by selling the website to AOL. Union organizers and Huffington Post bloggers slapped Arianna Huffington with a $105 million class action lawsuit and vowed to make her “a pariah in the progressive community.”

“In my view, the Huffington Post’s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington‘s plantation,” said labor activist and former Huffington Post blogger Jonathan Tasini.

Tasini added: “She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers….This all could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is basically to say, ‘Go screw yourselves, this is my money.’”

AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million.

How Capitalist Are the Cubans?

New York Times/ DAMIEN CAVE

allvoices.com

It was just a small sign, red, round and electrified, advertising homemade pizza — the kind of thing no one would notice in New York or Rome. But in Havana? It was mildly amazing.

Cuba, after all, has been dominated for decades by an all-consuming anticapitalist ideology, in which there were only three things promoted on billboards, radio or TV: socialism, nationalism, and Fidel and Raúl Castro. The pizza sign hanging from a decaying colonial building here represented the exact opposite — marketing, the public search for private profit.

And it wasn’t just tossed out there. Unlike the cardboard efforts I’d seen in the same poor neighborhood on a visit to Cuba last year, the sign cost money. It was an investment. It was a clear signal that some of Cuba’s new entrepreneurs — legalized by the government two years ago in a desperate attempt to save the island’s economy — were adapting to the logic of competition and capitalism.

But just how capitalist are Cubans these days? Are they embracing what Friedrich Hayek described as the “self-organizing system of voluntary cooperation,” or resisting?

“It’s a combination,” says Arturo López Levy, a former analyst with the Cuban government now a lecturer at the University of Denver. “When more people get more proactive and more assertive, then other people — whether they like it or not — have to do the same. They have to compete. I think that’s the dynamic.”

Indeed, like Iraq, Russia, Mexico or other countries that experienced decades of dictatorial rule that eventually ended, Cuba today is a society marked by years of abuse, divided and uncertain about its future. The changes of the past few years — allowing for self-employment, freer travel, and the buying and selling of homes and cars — have been both remarkable and extremely limited. The reasons small things like signs matter so much here is because everyone is concerned with momentum, and no one seems to know whether Cuba is really on the road to capitalism, as The Economist asserted in March, or if the island is destined to simply sputter along, with restrained capitalism for a few and socialist subsistence for the rest.

The debate is all the more complicated because the same leaders who rejected capitalism for so long are now the ones trying to encourage people to try it out. Raúl Castro was notoriously the revolution’s most loyal Communist; now, as the country’s president, he is the main booster for free market reforms. On one hand, a recent gathering of Cuba’s Communist Party earlier this year included a session on overcoming prejudices against entrepreneurs; on the other, Raúl Castro has said he would “never permit the return of the capitalist system.”

“They are kind of schizophrenic,” says Ted Henken, a Cuba expert at Baruch College. “They are saying they are changing, but they treat these things as gifts and not as rights.”

And yet, there is no longer any denying that pockets of controlled capitalism are emerging in Cuba. In Havana, in particular, small businesses are everywhere. Entire urban industries, including taxis and restaurants, are being transformed through a rush of new entrants, who are increasing competition for customers, labor and materials. Even the most elemental tasks that used to be managed by the state — such as buying food — are increasingly in the hands of a private system that sets its own prices based on supply and demand.

Though the initial burst of activity has slowed, some experts say the explosion in commerce showed just how capitalist Cubans were all along. Of the roughly 350,000 people licensed to be self-employed under the new laws by the end of 2011, 67 percent had no prior job affiliation listed — which most likely means they were running underground businesses that then became legitimate.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs are optimistic about Cuba’s becoming more open to free market ideas. Héctor Higuera Martínez, 39, the owner of Le Chansonnier, one of Havana’s finest restaurants (the duck is practically Parisian), says that officials are “starting to realize there is a reason to support private businesses.” He has given people work, for example, and he brings in hard currency from foreigners, including Americans.

“Before, we had nothing,” he said. “Now we have an opportunity.”

He is doing everything he can to make the most of it. When we met one night at the restaurant, he had already written up several pages of notes and charts explaining what his industry needed to grow — from wholesale markets to improved transportation for farmers to an end to the American trade embargo to changes in the Cuban tax code. In an ingeniously cobbled-together kitchen, in which only one of three ovens worked, he mostly seemed to salivate at the thought of vacuum packing so his meals could be delivered more efficiently.

HE was about as capitalist as it gets. But will his ideas ever be adopted? Like everyone else, he faces severe limits. He can hire no more than 20 employees, for example. He does not have access to private bank loans, and the government has shown little inclination to let people like Mr. Higuera succeed on a grand scale.

Instead, when success arrives, the government seems to get nervous. This past summer, officials shut down a thriving restaurant and cabaret featuring opera and dance in what had been a vacant lot, charging the owner with “personal enrichment” because he charged a $2 cover at the door. A news article from Reuters had described it as Cuba’s largest private business. A few days later, it was gone, along with 130 jobs.

The Castro government has tried to keep a lid on innovation in other ways, too. It has not allowed professionals like lawyers and architects to work for themselves. And its efforts at political repression have focused over the past few years on innovative young people seeking space for civil discourse in public and online — the blogger Yoani Sánchez, or Antonio Rodiles, director of an independent project called Estado de Sats, who was arrested in early November and released last week after 18 days in jail.

So for now, what Cuba has ended up with is handcuffed capitalism: highly regulated competitive markets for low-skilled, small family businesses. What economic freedom there is has mostly accrued to those whose main ambition is making and selling pizza.

Which again raises the question: is Cuba really heading toward capitalism or not? Skeptics are easy to find. “Every place in the world that has had real change, it has changed because the regime itself has allowed some significant openings and the door has been pushed wide open,” says Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey. “That’s not what’s happening here.”

Many Cubans say they are hesitant to let go of a reliable system summed up by a common joke: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” Taxi drivers told Mr. López Levy that they were working harder for less money because of increased competition. A farmer I met at the wholesale market outside Havana equated capitalism with higher prices, and said that the government needed to intervene.

But mostly, this is an aging crowd and Mr. López Levy — who still has friends and relatives in government — says that even among Cuban bureaucrats, the mentality is changing. If so, more capitalism may be inevitable. Because with every new entrepreneur it licenses, Cuba becomes less socialist, less exceptional, less of a bearded rebel raising its fist against the horrors of Yankee capitalism. In the eyes of some Cubans, the jig is already up.

“The government has lost the ideological battle,” said Óscar Espinosa Chepe, a state-trained economist who was sent to jail in 2003 for criticizing the government. “The battle for ideas was the most important battle, and they’ve lost.” 

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Damien Cave is a New York Times correspondent based in Mexico City.

Richard Wolff: 'Capitalism Is Not Working'

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Democracia y capitalismo en Cuba

no importa quien lo diga sino lo que se dice.
-------------------------------------------------

Por Alejandro Armengol

Por décadas en el exilio cubano de Miami se ha mantenido el credo de que llevar la libertad a Cuba pasa por la reinstauración de un sistema político dominado por el mercado. No es cierto. Capitalismo y democracia no son sinónimos. Pueden coincidir, pero no necesariamente. Se puede aspirar a que en la isla exista un Estado de derecho, el respeto absoluto a los derechos humanos, la propiedad privada y la libre empresa, sin que ello implique añorar una vuelta al pasado y apoyar la ilusión de convertir a La Habana en una copia de Miami.
De hecho, cada vez cobra mayor fuerza la evidencia de que el proceso de ´´actualización´´ que lleva a cabo el gobierno de Raúl Castro está muy cerca de una vuelta al capitalismo con cortapisas ¯en sus aspectos más superficiales y despiadados¯ y en nada interesado en el menor cambio en lo que respecta a las libertades ciudadanas.
Los fanáticos del neoliberalismo, que suelen confundir la falta de regulaciones y controles del mercado con la libertad política, deben leer una reseña de varios libros, que tratan sobre la supuesta decadencia mundial de Estados Unidos, realizada por Ian Buruma en el número del 21 de abril de 2008 en The New Yorker.
Buruma hace referencia a The Return of History and the End of Dreams, el libro de Robert Kagan, el ideólogo neoconservador de mayor talento en Estados Unidos. Dice Buruma que Kagan hace una buena observación al señalar lo que pasan por alto quienes creen que con sólo las bendiciones combinadas del comercio, capitalismo y propiedad creciente se llega inexorablemente a una democracia liberal.De acuerdo a Buruma, lo que se subestima es el atractivo internacional de la autocracia. La Unión Soviética, después del impulso inicial que recibió la industrialización fue un modelo de fracaso económico. Pero la China actual, hasta el momento, no lo es. Como dice Kagan, ''gracias a décadas de destacado crecimiento económico, los chinos pueden argumentar hoy que su modelo de desarrollo económico, que combina una economía cada vez más abierta con un sistema político cerrado, puede resultar exitoso para el desarrollo de muchas naciones''.
Un sistema similar al chino o al vietnamita, con las variantes tropicales al uso, es lo que debe estar en la mente en más de un tecnócrata o funcionario cubano. No es siquiera que el ideal de Raúl Castro sea la ¯puesta en práctica de ese modelo. Si algo se desprende de la realidad cubana actual, las declaraciones del jefe de Estado y los avances y retrocesos que han traído lo que la prensa extranjera llama ´´reformas´´ y la oficial de la isla denomina ´´actualización´´, es la existencia de un conjunto de medidas de supervivencia para navegar en el caos sin que se produzca un estallido social. Hasta ahora ¯hay que señalarlo¯ lo han logrado como si fueran los dueños absoluto del tiempo. No hay mérito en ello si se recuerda el ejemplo más de moda en estos momento, Corea del Norte, pero la casta militar cubana ha dado muestras de desempeñar con efectividad un rol productivo y no limitarse al poderío parásito de los militares norcoreanos.

Read more here: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2012/01/09/1097871/alejandro-armengol-democracia.html#storylink=cpy

The Glazov Gang: The Invented People

Posted by Frontpagemag.com

Nikonov on Capitalism and Human Dignity

Capitalism, Chinese Style

"Capitalism" comes to Cuba

"Capitalism" comes to Cuba La nueva pelicula de Uwe Boll, director de "Alone in the Dark", "House of the Dead" and "Postal" sera exhibido en Cuba proximamente. Casualidad o oportunidad?

Synopsis: 1985. A crumpled ticket litters the stock market floor. Two traders have lost all of their client's money. They have 48 hours to earn it back, or they will lose something even more valuable.

La sucesion vista desde la Izquierda: Retos y dificultades de Raul/ Entrevista a Heinz Dieterich