The Cuban leadership has decided on far-reaching reforms. Promoting foreign exchange–earning economic sectors and attracting foreign capital; committing state-owned companies to profit-oriented production standards; dismissing at least one million state employees; considerably expanding the small-scale private sector and promoting private farmers; abolishing what remains of state-guaranteed basic services as soon as possible. The government justifies its list of measures by pointing to the country’s catastrophic budget situation, which makes painful corrections unavoidable. At the same time, however, it promises that these measures will “preserve socialism, strengthen it and make it truly irreversible.” (Raúl Castro)
GᴇɢᴇɴSᴛᴀɴᴅᴘᴜɴᴋᴛ takes the reforms as an opportunity to critically assess the current end point as well as the general intentions, barriers, contradictions, and negative progress of fifty years of Cuban “socialism” — with an epilogue on Cuban friendship and enmity past and present.
Three parties are involved in the war in Ukraine: Russia as the aggressor that is carrying out a “special military operation”; Ukraine as the attacked state with its USA/NATO–trained and equipped army; and the West, i.e., USA and NATO in a newly united front including the EU. This third one may not be a direct party to the war, but it is a double one. It is firstly financing the Ukrainian state and organizing its military power.
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[Translated from "KOMMUNISMUS TOT?" in MSZ 5-1989]