Viva China!

November 29th, 2004

The President of China was visiting Cuba this week, en route from the big APEC summit in Chile.

While there, Cuban Vice President Raul Castro (Fidel isn’t so well lately) heaped praise upon the Chinese government for “using socialism” to achieve great wealth and power in the world. He then made the amusing claim that “we, too, adopt socialism to buttress our independence and economic development.”

The ironic part, of course, is that China has become a very capitalistic country in recent years, in practice if not necessarily in name. Cuba on the other hand has been merrily trudging down the same old road since 1959. Really, the two countries have about zero in common today, especially in the economic sphere.