A Failed Political System

          As the last bastion of communism in the western hemisphere and one of the few remaining communist nations in the world, Cuba has just abandoned one of this failed political system’s primary tenets.  At the very core of communism, as Marx and Engels originally described it, was the prohibition of private property.  The administration of President Raul Castro announced in Havana on Thursday that beginning November 10, citizens of Cuba will be allowed to buy and sell real estate property.  The news was met with jubilation by Cubans who just last month were granted the right to buy and sell automobiles.

The Mentality of Inertia

          Raul Castro, who took the reins from his ailing older brother Fidel in 2008, has acknowledged that the system of government in Cuba is not working.  In recent decades the country has been sliding into economic decline, just as its former benefactor, the Soviet Union, did more than 20 years ago.  There is something about communism that stifles productivity and dampens the will to work.  And when workers don’t work and producers don’t produce, the economy doesn’t grow.  In response, the somewhat more pragmatic new leaders in Havana have recently taken to exhorting the citizens of Cuba to ‘break the mentality of inertia’.  Fortunately, they are also instituting some tangible (see WOW) reforms.

A Long Way to Go

          In the Ten Planks of his 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx put the ‘abolition of private property’ in the number one spot, making the latest announcement from Havana all the more remarkable.  Despite the significant reforms under his tenure, the younger Castro insists that Cuba will remain a socialist state.  Marxist theory contends that socialism is a transitional stage on the road to communism.  It is a wonderful thing, then, to see Cuba now going in the reverse direction, which would make socialism just a transitional stage on the road to capitalism for the long suffering Cuban people.