At least for a few moments last week, we had the strange
spectacle of President Obama sounding more like a collectivist than
Fidel Castro.
With the federal payroll in the United States up by
200,000 positions and the private sector down by 7.8 million jobs
since the current recession began, Mr. Obama continues to
aggressively push a statist agenda of higher taxes and more
regulations on the nation’s key job creators in the private
sector.
Meanwhile in Cuba, retired dictator Fidel Castro dropped
an anti-statist, anti-communist bomb during an interview with
Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for the
Atlantic.
Asked by Mr. Goldberg if he believed the Cuban model was
still something worth exporting, Fidel replied, “The Cuban model
doesn’t even work for us anymore.”
Mr. Castro also apologized during the interview for his
regime’s treatment of gays, stated that Iran’s madcap president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should “stop slandering the Jews,” and
expressed regret about trying to convince Khrushchev to nuke the
United States.
A few days later, amid a worldwide flare-up about his
about-face on communism, Castro said he was quoted correctly but
misinterpreted.
“In reality, my answer meant exactly the opposite of what
both American journalists interpreted regarding the Cuban model,”
Castro claimed in a full switcheroo. “My idea, as the whole world
knows, is that the capitalist system no longer works for the United
States or the world. How could such a system work for a socialist
country like Cuba?”
In other words, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us
anymore” really means “The capitalist system no longer works for
the United States.” That’s nuts, but it’s the type of bold untruth
that a dictator thinks he can get away with after spending a
lifetime silencing dissent by way of bullets and
dungeons.
Accustomed to a population of bobble heads that’s afraid
to do anything but nod in submission, Fidel might well also claim
that what he really said in the Goldberg interview was that
Ahmadinejad loves Jews, Cuba was always nice to gays, and, in fact,
that his best friends are fully uncloseted gays, and that he
should’ve pushed Khrushchev harder to nuke the United
States.
He might add that Cubans are doing better economically
than ever. Why switch now when the average Cuban is making 67 cents
a day?
In any case, events on the ground show that Fidel was
telling the truth the first time around when he said that his
island’s pinko economic model isn’t working.
Weighing in last month on the failure of Cuban socialism,
Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and Cuba’s current despot, said, “We
have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in
the world where one can live without working.”
For starters, more than half a million state workers will
be cut from government payrolls over the next six months, Raul
declared, and be sent off to find work as best they can in newly
semi-legal and newly semi-encouraged private companies that are
currently non-existent.
Over 85 percent of Cuba’s 5.5 million workers are on the
state payroll. Raul Castro says that a million of those state
employees, over 20 percent of the payroll, are in
excess.
The country’s only authorized labor union obediently
chimed in, saying, “Our state can’t keep maintaining bloated
payrolls.”
In last Tuesday’s New York Times, John Kavulich,
a senior advisor for the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a
private group that provides information to American businesses
regarding Cuba’s commercial environment, asked a good question
about Cuba’s shift from official anti-capitalism to a somewhat
pro-entrepreneurship stance: “The Cuban government is going to
allow and by definition encourage people to go into private sector
opportunities. What happens when some people get rich?”
To make sure no one gets too rich except the Castro
brothers (Forbes magazine in 2006 listed Fidel Castro
among the world’s richest people, with an estimated net worth of
$900 million, up from $550 million in 2005), the Cuban regime has
put a very tight lid on the amount of economic freedom that will be
permitted in Cuba’s private sector.
Along with the plan to fire 500,000 public employees, and
another 500,000 at a later date, another measure will order “the
denationalization of beauty parlors and barber shops, if they have
no more than three chairs,” explains George Will. “With four or
more, they remain government enterprises.”
There in its purest form is a clear demonstration of the
irrationality of central planning. A million people will be fired
from their government make-work jobs and told to find real work in
a private sector where it’s illegal to have four chairs in a barber
shop.
