Word: cubans
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...much criticized debate last week, Clinton began attacking Obama for complaining (as did much of the media) that the questions focused heavily on gaffes and gotcha politics. In a commercial aired last weekend, over images of Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, the 1929 stock market crash, the Cuban Missile crisis and Osama bin Laden, Clinton reprised Harry Truman's famous line, "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen." In response, Obama was as forceful as he has ever been in the campaign, but some observers wonder if his show of toughness came too late. Even...
...sorts as an op-ed scribe since he resigned as Cuba's President earlier this year because of health problems, leaving Raul to become the government's new No. 1 two months ago. Since then, Raul, 76, has ordered a series of small but significant economic reforms, from letting Cubans own cell phones to allowing farmers to till their own land - ideas that Fidel doesn't always find communist kosher. In a brief article published this week in the government mouthpiece Granma, Fidel takes issue with the idea, posited recently by a Cuban columnist in another official newspaper, that Raul...
...essay - which warns Cubans to "meditate hard" on the policy changes and avoid "shameful concessions" - is the latest step in a strange sibling dance. Though long considered a hard-line communist, whose enemies accuse him of overseeing summary executions of soldiers loyal to former right-wing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the revolution's early days, Raul is considerably more pragmatic than the obdurately ideological Fidel. His encouragement of limited market-oriented policies like foreign investment in tourism helped see Cuba through its frightening "special period" after the island's lavish Soviet aid vanished in the 1990s...
...contrary op-eds are part "of an extremely delicate balance" Raul is pursuing in the early stages of his presidency, or at least until Fidel dies, says Dan Erikson, senior associate at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. "Does he disappoint Fidel or does he disappoint the Cuban people? The reality is that the legitimacy of his government rests on pleasing Cubans but not straying too far from Fidel." Analysts like Erikson concede that Raul's reforms, including permission to let Cubans buy electronics in dollar stores and gain title to their own homes, are "marginal...
...Even so, Cuban officials are warning people both inside and outside of Cuba not to expect a free-market economy on the island any time soon. And while Raul has encouraged debate about Cuba's socialist system, most analysts agree that he's pursuing a China-style model that opens Cuba's economy but does not liberalize Havana's stringent politics. Perhaps he knows that if he attempted the latter, he'd have to read even harsher op-eds by his brother...