"Cuba’s free market experiment proves to be mostly unprofitable" by Andrea Rodriguez and Anne-Marie Garcia | Associated Press, December 28, 2013
HAVANA — The dented metal pizza trays are packed away, so too the old blender that never worked when it was needed. Gone is the sweet smell of rising dough that infused Julio Cesar Hidalgo’s Havana apartment when he and his girlfriend were in business, churning out cheesy pies for hungry customers.
Two years on the front lines of Cuba’s experiment with limited free market capitalism has left Hidalgo broke, out of work, and facing a possible crushing fine. But the 33-year-old known for his wide smile and sunny disposition says the biggest loss is harder to define.
‘‘I feel frustrated and let down,’’ Hidalgo said, slumped in a rocking chair one recent afternoon, shrugging his shoulders as he described the pizzeria’s collapse. ‘‘The business didn’t turn out as I had hoped.’’
Isn't there anything the U.S. military can do to save Cuba?
The Associated Press recently checked in with nine small business owners whose fortunes it first reported on in 2011 as they set up shop amid the excitement of President Raul Castro’s surprising embrace of some free enterprise.
Among them were restaurant and cafeteria owners, a seamstress and taekwondo instructor, a bootleg-DVD vendor, and a woman renting rooms out to well-heeled tourists.
Their fates tell a story of divided fortunes.
Hey, just like us up north! Is Cuba's ratio all to the 1%, nothing for the other 99, too?
Of the six ventures that relied on revenue from cash-strapped islanders, four are now out of business, their owners in more dire financial straits than when they started. But the three enterprises that cater to well-heeled foreigners, and to the minority of well-paid Cubans who work for foreign businesses, are still going and in some cases thriving.
Just got my an$wer!
While the sample size is small, the numbers point to a basic problem that economists who follow Cuba have noted from the start: There simply isn’t enough money to support a thriving private sector on an island where salaries average $20 a month.
They don't have a Federal Reserve that can just print dollars?
‘‘Clearly, there is a macroeconomic environment that does not favor the private sector or the expansion of demand that the private sector requires,’’ said Pavel Vidal, a former Cuban Central Bank economist.
Vidal has long called on Communist authorities to adopt a huge stimulus package or more aggressively seek capital from foreign investors.
I don't know what to do -- actually, I do; each nation needs to return to government issuing of its own national denomination of currency -- but I do know that integrating more fully into the international economic $cheme promoted by the propaganda pre$$ is not the direction to go.
Now a professor at Colombia’s Javeriana University, he says one has only to look at the trends since 2011 to see the private sector economy is nearly tapped out. After a surge of enthusiasm, the number of islanders working for themselves has stalled for the past two years....
That means entrepreneurs, you know, the great AmeriKan dream.
--more--"
And look what came in the mail:
"US man marks 4 years in Cuban prison, writes Obama" by Jessica Gresko | Associated Press, December 04, 2013
WASHINGTON — An American who is marking four years in prison in Cuba has written a letter to President Obama, asking the president to get personally involved in securing his release.
Good luck.
Alan Gross was arrested four years ago Tuesday while working covertly in the Communist-run country to set up Internet access for the island’s small Jewish community, access that bypassed local restrictions. At the time, he was working as a subcontractor for the US government’s Agency for International Development, which works to promote democracy on the island.
AID = CIA, and the whole world knows it.
Related: Globe's Cuba Coverage is Gross
No change there, either. No call, nothing.
Cuba considers USAID’s programs illegal attempts by the United States to undermine its government, and Gross was tried and sentenced to 15 years in prison. His case has become a sticking point in improving ties between the two countries, which have not had formal diplomatic relations since 1961.
Because he is a spy that promoted regime change, and the Cuban Jewish community(in communist Cuba?) wanted and had nothing to do with him!
‘‘It is clear to me, Mr. President, that only with your personal involvement can my release be secured,’’ Gross wrote in a letter made public through a spokeswoman.
Gross, 64, said that he has ‘‘lost almost everything’’ over the past four years and that his family ‘‘has suffered tremendously.’’
Another victimized Jew.
His wife has visited him while he has been in prison, where he says he spends 23 hours a day in a small cell with two other inmates, but Gross said he has asked his two daughters not to visit because he ‘‘cannot bear them seeing me like this.’’
He has lost weight and suffers from arthritis.
Is he on a hunger strike, too, like those poor and innocent lost souls in Gitmo indefinitely that never see family that doesn't know where they are?
