Wow! Here are words I rarely utter: Why can’t the United States be more like Cuba?
The struggling dictatorship in the Caribbean is getting ready to do something right.
The Financial Times reports:
Communist Cuba will shift hundreds of thousands of state employees to the private sector in 2011 as the government prunes more than 500,000 workers from its payroll.
The official trade union federation said on Monday that eventually more than a million jobs would be cut.
“Job options will be increased and broadened with new forms of non-state employment, among them leasing land, co-operatives and self-employment absorbing hundreds of thousands of workers in the coming years,” the union statement said.
And it looks as if capitalism is renewing itself in Cuba though sheer human dynamism:
Self-employment, begun in the 1990s, covers everything from family-run restaurants to car repair shops, construction and artisans. Non-state jobs included workers hired by the self-employed, ex-state employees such as taxi drivers who would move to a leasing arrangement, and employees of small state businesses that went over to a co-operative form of administration, said sources who have seen the plan.
Cuba sees the light at a time when public sector employment in the U.S. is growing by leaps and bounds. No doubt, there will be too much central planning and government interference in Cuba’s dramatic shift-but it’s going in the right direction. Unlike us.