A Million Jobs, Gone

You’re fired! Now get a real job.

Does this sound mean? 

It’s just what Cuba’s biggest employer plans to say between now and March — fire half a million workers and tell them to find other jobs, or (better yet) go to work for themselves.

After March, another half million will be given pink slips.

Or so say the Castro Bros., who are, in effect, the chief employers in Cuba. 

Just like a despot, you might say. But hey: The country is broke, and the initial hiring of everybody by the government (which Fidel ran for scores of years, and his brother, Raul, now runs) was, itself, despotic. Thankfully, as more and more outlets of the “Cuban Communist Corp.” go under, the Cuban commissars say they will ease up on the regulations that now prohibit small, entrepreneurial businesses.

Of the many comments I’ve read about this, I was amused most by Tom Knapp’s. After drily noting that it is the Castros who will build down government, not Republicans in the U.S., he explained how the commies had kept their transportation going all these years: By maintaing old American cars from the ’40s and ’50s. Now that trade restrictions will likely be eased, those well-​kept-​up vintage cars could help “finance an explosion of economic prosperity just by tapping the U.S. classic car collectors’ market.”

Hope so.

And I hope the newly fired will transition to a slightly freer economy without too much trouble.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.