Cuba is about to lay off 500,000 workers.
By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
We’re not the only ones with unemployment problems.
Cuba is poised to lay off 500,000 workers. Yep. Half a million.
And that’s a country with 5.1 million workers. We have 30 times more workers – 150 million – in the United States.
So that would be like a layoff of 15 million here.
To give you an idea of that 500,000 figure, the largest layoff in U.S. history was 60,000 IBM workers in 1993. January 2009 was the most gruesome month of our current economic entanglement. And we lost 163,000 jobs then.
And these are half a million comrades, to boot. So to speak.
Bad enough to get your walking papers here. But it must be real tough to accept the pink slip in a communist country.
I mean, one of the trade-offs of $20-a-month wages is supposed to be a certain level of job security.
Getting laid off is so tough that the Castro government seems to be readying its security forces.
Oh, yeah, did I mention that despite the draconian cuts in Cuba, there’s no talk of military cuts?
Of course.
But don’t get caught chortling too loudly. That’s not unlike another country I know and love.