Feeling for Stones, or Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes?

Gauging by the tone of several news articles in the past 24 hours (e.g. The End of Communism?; UK Guardian Article; Miami Herald Article), you'd think that communism had been all but abandoned in Cuba. The introduction of a more incentive-based wage system and easing of wage restraints, which was announced in Granma on Wednesday, certainly diverges from standard Marxist economic policy and, in theory, is a welcome move. But if you look a little deeper than the couple of brief paragraphs that the average article describing this latest "reform" announcement contains, you'll just see more of the same cosmetic and overbought reforms that still do not address the large fundamental problems in Cuba, and they might actually cause other unintended problems given that the Cuban Economy is still centrally planned and lacks free markets and a proper price system. And while, at best, it can be viewed as an inching towards a more liberalized economy, it does not give hope that the Cuban state will follow with political reforms or cease its unremitting human rights abuses.

In practice, average bonuses of up to 5% for meeting production quotas and managerial bonuses of up to 30% for increased productivity, besides still being meager given Cuban's suppressed wages, will be difficult to properly award without a price system as these monetary incentives also incentivize managers to lie about production levels. In a centrally planned economy, the amount of information the economic ministries would need to attain in order to properly distribute these bonuses would require a great deal more "surveillance", as Dr. Purcell put it. Even then, without a price system, this increased surveillance will still not capture all economic information, truthfully and efficiently, and it is doomed for failure as it has in countless other communist economies. Changing small aspects within the economy, without addressing other interdependent mechanisms, is either a recipe for failure, or the sign of a tactical public relations move, one that befits its efforts to lift E.U. and U.S. sanctions.

If one were to take a Panglossian view, and believe that this move signals the start of incremental measures towards market liberalization (and I'm sure the Cuban state would vehemently deny this) as Cuba "crosses the river by feeling for stones", it still does not mean that Cuba has adopted the Chinese or Vietnamese models, which would require much more drastic and thorough economic reforms. It also does not mean that the Cuban people are any closer to enjoying the liberty, human rights, and political freedoms that they've long been denied, and which the Chinese and Vietnamese models have not provided for their own citizens.