• by Leonardo Padura Fuentes
• Tuesday, June 30, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Cubans are placing their hopes not in the G7 or G20 meetings, or in possible crisis-driven modifications of the global capitalist system, but rather in the social and economic changes announced by the government two years ago, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.

In this article, Padura writes that recent changes, especially in the team inherited by the government of Raul Castro, as well as the first moves by the Obama administration to ease restrictions on travel and remittances to the island, have aroused hopes that the Cuban crisis might lift at any moment.

And yet, at the same time, the lack of signs of movement on the long-awaited economic opening or the diversification of the forms of property and of production, tend to suggest that the socialist economic structure will remain the preference of the country's leadership and that nothing will change.

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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