Apparently Fidel Castro wasn’t kidding when he said the “Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore” last week. Cuba announced on Monday that it will lay off a whopping 500,000 state workers over the next six months (the island has a total population of 11 million) and will open up the island’s private sector in order to replace them. President Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, had promised to eliminate 1 million state jobs, a full fifth of the country’s workforce, but people did not expect him to move so quickly. Cuba’s government controls 90 percent of the economy.
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