The Necropolitan Sentinel

El Nuevo Herald has an article in Spanish,
Los privados: los que más ganan en Cuba, about Cuba’s barely-emerging private sector. It demonstrates that private enterprise farmers and urban workers are out-earning people on the government’s payroll: In the private sector, farmers earned $28, and urban workers $41–compared to $18 for those who get government wages.

That’s $41 a month.

Now ponder for a moment how that reflects on this island-prison, whose people are not allowed to leave.

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The celebrity chef and prolific writer Anthony Bourdain went to Cuba, and Ernesto Fontova sheds some light on Bourdain’s thoughtless exhortation, “Yes, go to Cuba!” and how such sentiments continue to prolong the dictatorship.

Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog

UPDATE, JM: We have to get it through to people that it’s nearly impossible to go to Cuba without putting some money into the Castros’ hands–one way or the other. If there were a way to travel there and support the private enterprises only, that would be one thing; but they have made it nearly impossible to do. Cuba is not like China, where some private enterprise can flourish due to benign neglect: its small size makes it easier to practice a consistent form of totalitarianism.

That makes things a lot dicier for those who want to get money into the hands of the insurgent capitalists.

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