I'm worried that this is signalling that the embargo and sanctions that were impossed will be considered "successful" by the west and used as justification to do it again.
The whole sanctions regime is now collapsing globally because there is an alternative trade systems in BRICS. It's just causing more and more countries to stop trading in dollar and void western financial institutions.
Just days ago we had Medvedev in Iran announcing intent to formalize some kind of anti-sanctions institution.
Yeah, the US sanctioned so many countries at this point, that it's now a whole economic bloc.
i really hope that the reforms serve the nation of cuba and make them more prosperous though i am worired
It is a risk to be sure, but this approach can work well as we see in both Vietnam and China right now.
All change comes with risk.
A timely article and a necessary read for some of our comrades who are perhaps, as comrade Jiang Zemin said, "too young, too simple, sometimes naive".
“There is no sovereignty with an empty plate”
I never cease to be amazed just how idealistic western left is. I suspect this largely stems from the fact that there is very little actual organizing happening, and most people are just LARPing being a communist online without having any understanding of the complexities involved in a genuine struggle. It's always easy to criticize real work other people are doing.
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?
From elsewhere in the article:
Crucially, land remains nationally owned: what is being widened is the right to use and invest in it, not the right to accumulate it. The financial sector is to be opened to greater private and foreign participation under state regulation; the energy sector is reoriented sharply towards renewables; and digital technologies, software and artificial intelligence are to be applied across agriculture, healthcare, logistics, tourism and trade.
Thank you. That's what I get for reading when I wake up in the middle of the night. 😖
Cuba is a socialist country trying to achieve communism.