Politics and Culture

When you combine those new reforms with low salaries the only result will be more corruption, and Lord knows Cuba is rife with corruption now.
I am the most defeatist person in the world when it comes to the future of Cuba. When you have a small country where Castro wanted 3 sugar harvests a year and slash and burn methods so much for soil conditions. Figure it out. A country of 45 000 sq. miles where 40%(18 000 sq. miles) was arable. Castro wanted 3 cane harvests a year and slash and burn, every time you burn you lose an inch of top soil, 3 inches a year over decades is an enviromental nightmare. Throw agriculture out the window.
Then someone says the answer is petroleoum and nickle deposits. The wildest estimates come out to a few months of energy for the US and those estimates are always an exageration, and the nickle deposits? We're talking about a country of 11 000 000 inhabitants, you need far more than what that provides.
Then someone says tourism. Look at the Dominican Republic. Mass tourism, mass poverty, and according to public opinion polls 65% want to leave.
Then someone says that the answer is bio-technology. There's a Cuban pharmaceutical-PPG-that supposedly reduces cholesterol. For the first times there have been studies not financed by the Cuban government. One at the University of Cologne in Germany, the other at the University of Nova Scotia in Canada. Outright placebo.
Then another person says assembly plants like in Mexico or Central America, but every year more and more people try to get out of those countries.
While all of this goes on not only do 70% of all pregnancies end in abortion but for every 100 girls born 118 boys are born as a result of gendre-based abortions with all of the social problems that accompany that.
Then the water situation, the housing situation.
Against that background there is not a Cuban who does not know that 90 miles to the north his own are doing well.
There is a mass exodous coming. With or without the embargo, democracy, capitalism, Cuban adjustment act, petroleoum.
Another point about agriculture. All of the crazy experiments that man did. You can not grow wine grapes in Cuba. Or strawberries or peaches, but the guy kept trying with all the subsequent soil damage, plus the salinazation of soils due to the damming of rivers.