So government control of the economy (communism, socialism, statism) just hasn't worked out for Cuba. They've been trying to make it work since ousting Fulgencio Batista in 1959, and it really should not have taken them this long to realize that the alternative they were trying would not work; it never does.
This piece in the Wall Street Journal spells it out. Cuba is now pursuing a market-oriented system, which is not quite a free-market system, but it's a step in the right direction.
Cuba will lay off more than half a million state workers and try to create hundreds of thousands of private-sector jobs, a dramatic attempt by the hemisphere's only Communist country to shift its nearly bankrupt economy toward a more market-oriented system.
Now if our current administration would just learn the same lesson, things will get better for everybody, and we won't end up like the elderly couple pictured above. Of course, the lesson still needed to be learned by both governments is: governments don't create jobs; the private sector does.
