The reforms unquestionably carry risks. A property market, private banks, large firms and remittance-funded investment will tend to generate a propertied stratum, and in the Cuban case along existing fault lines of access to hard currency and family abroad. None of this should be waved away; it is the real cost of the policy. But the wager is a considered one, and it rests on a proposition that China has spent nearly 50 years testing: that a socialist state which keeps political power, public ownership of the commanding heights and the levers of planning and redistribution in its own hands can use markets and foreign capital to develop without being captured by them.

I’m unclear on property reforms. Are large swaths of land open to private ownership?