September 18, 2010
Is this the beginning of the end for the Castro brothers in Cuba, and if so, what should Washington do?
The announcement Monday that, over the next six months, Cuba will fire more than 500,000 workers -- or fully 10 percent of the workforce in a country of 11 million people -- is a far more radical change than any of the island's past free-market flirtations and an extraordinary admission of failure.
The firings have already begun, and the question is whether Raul Castro, the plan's champion, can control an unraveling of this perestroika any better than Mikhail Gorbachev did in the Soviet Union.
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