Awesome Guardian piece on the Cuban regime’s bold plan to stop paying people nothing to do nothing:

Authorities announced yesterday they will lay off more than 1 million state employees in the island’s biggest economic shake-up since the 1960s.

Cuts begin immediately, with 500,000 jobs due to go by March. Loosened controls on private enterprise will, it is hoped, jumpstart the private sector and turn former public workers into entrepreneurs…

Unemployment last year was officially 1.7%, but with average monthly salaries of only $20, supplemented by a ration book and free health care and education, many Cubans make minimal efforts, prompting an old joke: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." Che Guevara’s dream of creating a "socialist man" motivated by moral rather than material incentives has long been abandoned…

 "People knew this was coming, but now it’s here, it’s real, and they’re worried. Bosses will get rid of the least productive employees, the ones who don’t work or show up for work."

Why should there be any social explosion in Cuba if people who don’t work no longer have ‘jobs’?

Hurrah.

As has been noted here many times, you can evade reality, but you can’t avoid the consequences of evading reality.

In this noteworthy case it’s taken 50 years for the consequences to pile up nicely, to the point where even the doddery communists running Cuba have spotted them.