Cuba to Privatize Massive Aspects of Economy

It must be getting real tough there to have to adopt free market ideology as a means to prop the system after 6 decades of left wing economic stagnation:

MEXICO CITY — In perhaps the clearest sign yet that economic change is gathering pace in Cuba, the government plans to lay off more than half a million people from the public sector in the expectation that they will move into private businesses, Cuba’s labor federation said Monday.

Over the past several months, President Raúl Castro has given stern warnings that Cuba’s economy needs a radical overhaul, beginning with its workers. With as many as one million excess employees on the state payroll, Mr. Castro has said, the government is supporting a bloated bureaucracy that has sapped motivation and long sheltered a huge swath of the nation’s workers.

“We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working,” he told the National Assembly last month.

Since permanently taking over from his brother Fidel two years ago, Mr. Castro has often pledged to make Cuba’s centralized, Soviet-style economy more efficient and open up opportunities for people. The government has handed tens of thousands of acres of state-held farmland to private farmers and begun freeing up a market for agricultural supplies. It has loosened restrictions on cellphones and other electronics, and created a few areas for private business, allowing barbers’ shops to become cooperatives and giving more licenses to private taxi drivers.

But these initial reforms have been comparatively limited, many analysts contend, and Cuba’s economy — grappling with the fallout from the global financial crisis and the aftermath of devastating hurricanes in 2008 — appears to be in dire shape.

The system didn't work.