How many free-market reforms can Cuba make and still call itself Communist?
The world’s last relic of Marxist-style economies relaxed their policies yet again this week to allow the first wholesale agricultural market farmers have seen for generations. Since 2008, when the reforms of Fidel’s brother Raul began altering the economic legacy of the infamous Cold War Castro regime, over one-half million small businesses have been encouraged to innovate, employ and operate in the service sector. What impact will this incremental embrace of capitalism have upon the socio-political landscape? Can Cuba maintain a closed social order while it expands its economic principles and operations? Historians and culture-junkies, pundits and politicians, documentarians and artists speculate wildly divergent theories of the enchanted island’s future.
Upon one thing they all agree: Cuba will change. See it now, and be a measure of that transformation. Read on.