Perhaps it is not premature to note what is likely to be Fidel Castro's most significant accomplishment, experimental verification of Ludwig von Mises' explanation for the impossibility of socialism.
For example, Cuban planners abandoned their ambitious industrialization plan for the 1960s when they realized that many of the plants they had built consumed more in inputs, when priced in line with the world market, than the value of the outputs. More recently, Cuba's 2002 decision to close 71 of its 150 sugar mills, temporarily increasing unemployment by approximately 100,000, was also based on world-market price observations.
--Rodolfo A Gonzales and Edward Strongham, "Incentives vs. Knowledge: Reply to Caplan", Critical Review Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2, p. 189
Update: from an FAO Sugar Commodity Note
Further downsizing of the industry has been halted as world sugar prices continue to remain strong, and several mills will reopen in 2007.
Update 2: They have a local admirer.
Update 3: The Crackdown in Cuba by Theresa Bond, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003
Cuba's disastrous economic situation has grown so dire, in fact, that merely acquiring enough food to eat has become a full-time preoccupation. The creeping dollarization of consumer goods has made survival on a salary paid in local currency mathematically impossible; American dollars were made legal in 1993 and today are simply indispensable. As for the regime's traditional counterargument -- that health and education are still free and excellent -- it no longer carries much weight. Hospitals are decrepit, basic medicines are unavailable (except in foreigners-only pharmacies), schools indoctrinate instead of teaching, and, as Cubans say, "One is not always either sick or learning."
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