Cuban President Berates His People

(Havana, Cuba) The island nation of Cuba is having economic problems. President Raul Castro said errors must be corrected or the communist revolution will be lost.

During his address lasting more than two hours, Castro made a review of the errors committed in the country, was critical of socialism being misinterpreted, and announced the very strict demands he was making of the country’s leaders with regard to reforms on the island.

He called for an end to the excessive secrecy and lies among the country’s leaders and said that those who lie “must be removed once and for all and not temporarily from the posts they occupy,” and must even be expelled from the Communist Party.

The Cuban president said that the government’s decisions must be carried out and not become a dead letter as has so often occurred, and insisted that repeating errors puts “the life of the revolution” at risk.[…]

About the application of his plan of economic reforms, including a plan announced in August to lay off 500,000 state employees and expand opportunities for small business, he said that the “adversaries of the revolution” are carrying out campaigns warning that this process will be a failure and is being received with skepticism on the island.

In response, he said that he was not elected president of the island to “restore capitalism in Cuba nor to surrender the revolution,” but to continue perfecting socialism.[…]

In addition to the layoff plan, Raul Castro, who formally succeeded ailing older brother Fidel almost three years ago, has reduced the size of Cubans’ food rations, cut back on energy use and suspended payment of Havana’s foreign debts in a bid to relieve the government’s liquidity squeeze.

Let's see. The government is cutting back on food rations and energy use in its quest of a perfect socialist society. Therefore, Cuba is trending consistent with empirical evidence from North Korea, Zimbabwe, the USSR, and others, that the ultimate human condition achieved via socialism is widespread, evenly-distributed poverty.