“I’d Like to Have More Opportunity, to Buy a Car, and Have a Few Possessions”

Says a 41-year-old Cuban construction worker.  This is what almost sixty years of socialism has done for the Cuban people: They can only dream of someday having “some possessions.”

Almost everyone in Cuba is employed by the state, which pays them the equivalent of $30/month.  Karl Marx predicted that under capitalism workers would be paid only “subsistence wages” that were enough to keep them alive and dragging themselves to work every day. As with almost all of Marx’s predictions, exactly the opposite is true: While workers have gained tremendously under capitalism they are starving with subsistence wages in one of the last bastions of Marxian socialism (apart from American universities).

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11:17 am on April 19, 2018