Haligonians look at Cuba's transition

Photo and caption from Aljazeera.net: "Cubans who previously worked for the state will be encouraged to take up farming under new economic policies [AJE]"

Halifax native Chris Arsenault, now a staff reporter for Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, has written an illuminating piece on economic transitions underway in Cuba. He muses about what Che Guevara would think of the Cuban government's forthcoming layoffs of 500,000 public employees, who will be encouraged to become small-business entrepreneurs.

Arsenault gets analysis from two Halifax academics with long histories of work in Cuba. Isaac Saney, adjunct professor at St. Mary's University and author of Cuba: A Revolution in Motion, notes that "Cuba exists in the real world" and that this type of reform is, to some degree, inevitable; while John Kirk, professor of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University and author of several books on Cuba, says capitalists should think twice before gloating about Castro’s socialism being a failure: “look at what is happening in the rest of the world … look at capitalism, look at the bailouts and the recession," says Kirk. Meanwhile, the island state will still "have the best statistics for infant mortality and literacy in the developing world" even after market reforms, he notes.

The contrast with capitalist economies is refreshing, especially considering most mainstream articles like this one treat Cuba as an authoritarian rogue in isolation of the rest of the world, with no mention of the 50-year-old crippling U.S. trade embargo, high Cuban scores on the human development index, or the fact that some Western free-market allies like Saudi Arabia are hardly lands of political freedom. A good break from the casual demonization of Cuba that permeates our consciousness (except during those all-inclusive vacatons, of course).

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