Word: monreal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...almost nothing before the revolution, and after 34 years they are fiercely proud of the guarantees -- so rare in Latin America -- and are determined not to lose them. "There is no way you can take away the achievements of the revolution," says 35-year-old reformer Pedro Monreal. "They are installed on the hard disk of my generation." Cubans insist they will manage to keep these benefits and still revive their shattered economy...
...have to collect Julio Carranza, the young deputy director of the Communist Party's Center for American Studies, at his house. He has no gas for his car, and his neighborhood is blacked out. We enter another world when we sit down with him and Monreal in the gilded elegance of Havana's Ferminia Restaurant -- dollars only. Wolfing down real meat, the two thirtysomething economists paint glowing pictures of a wondrous second-generation Marxism where quasi-private enterprise pays for the nation's broad social safety...
...both systems: the benefits of socialism and the wealth of the free market. Cuba can succeed where Russia and Eastern Europe have failed. But even these experts have only the vaguest notions of how. "I think we can do it if there is more income for the state," says Monreal. The two envision less central planning but government control over the shape of the economy: a system encompassing private, cooperative and state ownership, all working to the common good. They talk of taxes, salary scales, redundant employment, monetary reform, but have no idea how they would really work...
...young Marxists are advocating economic change before political change -- the path the Chinese insist they are taking, in contrast to the approach favored by Mikhail Gorbachev when he ran the Soviet Union. "Communist parties around the world have faced our same dilemma, the sequence of reform," says Monreal. "In Cuba's case, the choice was to promote economic reform first. That will transform the state." The yummies admit that major alterations in the political system are unlikely anytime soon. "How can you open up political reform while the economy is a mess? It's suicidal," argues political scientist Santiago Perez...