Cuba The Turning Tide

THE convulsions that exploded four years ago must he analysed not merely in relation to the demise of the Soviet Union, but from the ravages of economic liberalism and unrelenting global capitalist stagnation: unemployment has returned on a scale not seen since the Great Depression; the Welfare State is unceremoniously demolished; inequalities between rich and poor are soaring astronomically, no longer dissimulated even by the figleal of electoral ballyhoo; their repressible concentration of Big Capital remains inseparable from the excrement of unstoppable political corruption, proliferating at exponential rates. Yet all conspiring to a single end: the abject unending liquidation of jobs, and the smashing of wages of the world of labour Meditations on the misfortunes of others cannot serve to rationalise the agony of the Cuban people, or diminish the incidence of their pain. For those liberal peddlers of salvation who tirelessly preach the gospel of laisser -faire as the Grand Panacea, the cataclysmic repercussions of the IMF/WB policies of structural adjustments, privatisations and deregulation in the third world, and elsewhere, are an apocalyptic reminder of the workings of Big Capital.