change in cuba:
Some Fidelistas and ardent supporters of the Cuban revolution will object that it is all caused by the US embargo. It is true that Washington's draconian blockade spanning more than four decades and 10 US presidents, has inflicted incalculable damage. The government estimates that since the sanctions were first imposed in the 1960s, Cuba has lost an average of $1.8bn dollars a year from exports denied, damage to production, from financial blocks on Cuban dollar accounts held with banks in third countries, and exorbitant extra shipping costs.
(...) Shortages of some medicines, and the high price of imported goods and machinery is rightly blamed on Washington's undeclared war on Cuba, but this does not account for the erratic supply of eggs, the high price of good-quality Cuban coffee in the shops, and the scarcity of fish, to name but a few home-made irritations inflicted on the good citizens of Havana.
(...) One of the revolutionary heroes of the urban underground in Santiago de Cuba 1959, Professor Jose Guzman, has expounded on the need for: "A decentralised cooperatives controlled by local communities." He has sent his research on this to party leaders.
(...) The changes that are coming are unlikely to fulfil the entrepreneurial hunger of investor groups that descend in droves on newly opened-up economies. Cuba is not eastern Europe. The Cuban objective appears to be to inject more flexibility and rationality into the existing economy, rather than capitulate to a neoliberal world.