This report from an independent journalist feels almost like a tour of Cuba for those of us who cannot afford to travel there. It is also offers a lot of reassurance to us ordinary people that Cuba is not going on a capitalist road to deliver their labor and resources to a tiny class identified as capitalists whether Cuban or foreigners.
When the Cuban government announced in 2010 that it was going to lay off more than half a million public sector workers, the US mainstream media proclaimed the failure of socialism and a shift towards capitalism. The Cuban government’s reduction in the public sector workforce was viewed in the same light as the austerity measures implemented by capitalist nations throughout the global South under neoliberalism. But such analysis highlighted a fundamental misunderstanding of Cuban socialism that is common in the Western mainstream media.However Leech points to one current threat to their society which could deliver Cubans to a capitalist world of inequality and social injustice:
Younger generations in particular, those too young to recall life prior to 1959 and who take many of the revolution’s social achievements for granted because they have existed since they were born, are inundated with capitalist propaganda in the form of Hollywood movies and TV shows as well as on the Internet. They are being seduced by the capitalist consumer dream—and this, perhaps more than anything else, poses the greatest threat to Cuba’s socialist model.Such media entertainment has seduced much of the world to support capitalist governments. Thus this threat must not be underestimated.
