Castro's great achievement of vast underemployment threatened--by Castro himself!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 12:08AM 
Is nothing sacred in this post-Cold War world?
AP story by way of Stewart Ross:
At a state project to refurbish a decaying building in OldHavana, one worker paints a wall white while two others watch. A fourth sleeps in a wheelbarrow positioned in a sliver of shade nearby and two more smoke and chat on the curb.
President Raul Castro has startled the nation lately by saying about one in five Cuban workers may be redundant. At the work site on Obispo street, those numbers run in reverse.
It's a common sight in communist Cuba. Here, nearly everyone works for the state and official unemployment is minuscule, but pay is so low that Cubans like to joke that "the state pretends to pay us and we pretend to work."
Now, facing a severe budget deficit, the government has hinted at restructuring or trimming its bloated work force. Such talk is causing tension, however, in a country where guaranteed employment was a building block of the 1959 revolution that swept Fidel Castro to power.
Such vast underemployment is a chronic condition in underdeveloped countries. Castro great success comes in making it a staple of socialism. Do it long enough and you can effectively kill a people's will to work, truly infantilizing them.
It'll be interesting to watch Cubans disown this clown once he's dead and buried and the creaking system collapses.
Paging Oliver Stone!
Reader Comments (2)
"the state pretends to pay us and we pretend to work." - that's soviet proverb. Cuba imported it with socialism.
I know a German whose Cuban Citrus was rejected for EU entry for improper sizing. He couldn't get the Government to allow him to incentivize his workers by rewarding improvements in quality control, because that was against Socialist principles. He ended up disgustedly closing-up the money-losing operation.