Wall Street Journal
Editorial
September 16, 2010
An old joke from the Soviet era had it that "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Most Cubans stopped pretending to work a long time ago, and this week the Castro regime announced that it will now stop pretending to pay them.
That might be the best way to think about the news, reportedly contained in an Aug. 24 internal document, that Cuba's Communist Party is proposing to lay off more than 500,000 workers by March 2011 because it can no longer afford to maintain its "bloated payrolls." If nothing else, this is an historic acknowledgment that the revolution has failed—and from its own architects.
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