Cuba has told one-fifth of its government workers that communism hasn't worked out for them and they'll have to find jobs in the private sector.



Those aren't quite the words President Raul Castro used, but that's what he meant when he said 1 million jobs would be slashed from the state's payroll.



In turn, Castro said, the government had "agreed to expand the range of self-employment jobs, and their use as another alternative for workers who lose their jobs."

Good luck with that: 95 percent of the economy is in the state's hands, and the state, as we have seen, is laying people off.

Cuba once had a fling with self-employment, but it was a little too successful. According to Agence France Presse (AFP), thriving little service businesses, especially restaurants, aroused social resentment, so the communist government burdened the budding private sector with taxes and regulations and made licenses harder to come by until "the self-employed sector was largely rendered paralyzed," the news service said, adding cruelly, "like the rest of the economy."



The Associated Press (AP) notes the Cuban government is more than halfway there in a plan to distribute 4.4 million acres of state land to private farmers. Giving up on state-run farms, the AP said, is "an effort to revitalize an agriculture sector hampered by decades of government mismanagement."



There is one small glitch in the planning. The government is the only source of seed and fertilizer, and so far the authorities have failed to distribute them.



As the Cuban government is learning, when all else fails, which often seems to be the case in Cuba, try capitalism.



The article was distributed by Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).



