Cuba Announces Free Market Reforms
The AP reports:
HAVANA (AP) -- Cuba's communist leaders mapped out a brave new world of free enterprise on Friday, approving a laundry list of small-time businesses, allowing islanders to take on employees and even promising credit to burgeoning entrepreneurs.
The reforms - laid out in a three-page spread in the Communist Party-daily Granma - seem sure to create a society of haves and have-nots in a land that has spent half a century striving for an egalitarian utopia.
They follow last week's announcement that the government will lay off 500,000 workers by the end of March - or one-tenth of the country's workforce - the biggest change in Cuba's economic system since the early 1990s.
For the first time, Cubans in 83 private activities will be allowed to employ people other than their relatives, and they will be able to sell their services to the state as private contractors. Accountants, currently only permitted to work for the state, can set out on their own, keeping the books for the new businesses.
Cubans who want to rent their homes to travelers will no longer have to live on the premises and can hire staff. Even islanders authorized to live overseas - though apparently not exiles - can take part in the economic changes by renting out the cars and homes they leave behind.
And the Central Bank is studying ways to grant small-business loans that are crucial to any free-market system, but which would have been unthinkable in Cuba just weeks ago.
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