By MARC LACEY

Cuba’s recent plan cut the government work force by 10 percent while expecting the hundreds of thousands of laid-off workers to find places in a new system resembling free enterprise will bring wrenching change to the Communist country .

On a scale not known for half a century, Cubans will be hiring other Cubans for smallscale enterprises, without the direct involvement of the Communist Party. The idea of receiving a paycheck whether one loafs, sleeps or shows up at all will be under a new challenge. And it is possible that creating a cadre of quasi-capitalists could unleash forces that the Castros or their successors will prove unable to control.

But is Cuba approaching a transformation of the kind that swept Russia and China? It is tempting to imagine so . Nevertheless, experts on Cuba warn against reading any such far-reaching expectations into the announcement. Yoani Sanchez, a dissident Cuban blogger, wrote recently: “Under the strict canons of the socialist economy ? planned, centralized and subsidized ? self-employment has always been seen as an undesirable species of pest that periodically needs to be abated and occasionally even exterminated.”

Yes, the Castro government is acknowledging a deep problem. But it has also always linked its core ideology to its fear and disdain of the United States and its economic system. So its ferocious pursuit of independence from American economic influence - even as it denounces Washington’s embargo on trade - would make a radical shift to joining the global free-trade system that the United States dominates particularly difficult to explain.

A Cuban sociologist, Haroldo Dilla, predicts that in the end the new system will not enable Cubans to rise too far out of poverty, and that the government will resist a true economic opening with the world. Which is not to say that the leadership wants no change at all. President Raul Castro views Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reinvigorate the Soviet political system, which led to Communism’s collapse, as a cautionary


Cuba’s plan to allow more small business, like this produce stall in Havana,may be hard to control.


tale. The mix of consumerism and authoritarianism that one finds in Vietnam and China is presumably a more palatable model ? privatization, but with the state in firm control. Still, the plan announced so far is much more modest than what the Asian countries have done.

Instead, it seems designed simply to boost Cuba’s economic productivity in smallscale enterprises and thus loosen up a state-run economy and work force that have been sputtering for years. The announcement of layoffs also does not represent Cuba’s first experimented with privatization. Many small-scale occupations are already allowed .

But Cuba relies on one export commodity - sugar - which the Soviet Union bought at subsidized prices. Only relatively recently has it invited some European partners for joint ventures; for example, in tourism. A broad opening to new manufacturing, for example, would presumably mean welcoming an influx of private capital from abroad to produce export goods on Cuban soil. It would also probably require normalizing trade and diplomatic relations with the United States.

And it might even invite efforts to return to Cuba by exiles who still have claims on industrial enterprises they left as enemies of the revolution. Of course, Cuba and the United States are more linked than government officials in both capitals like to admit - through family bonds, for example.

“If fully carried out, a major expansion of Cuba’s private sector will benefit many thousands of Cuban families and give Cuban-Americans opportunities through remittances to help relatives in Cuba who will be working on their own,” Philip Peters, of the security- and free-market-oriented Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, wrote on his blog, the Cuban Triangle.


Cuba’s latest experiment
with privatization could lure back exiled industrialists. A flower seller plies his trade in
Havana

Ted Henken, a professor at Baruch College who studies private enterprise in Cuba, epitomizes the ambivalence with which prudent Cuba-watchers are assessing the latest news. “This is the beginning of what we’ve all been waiting for,” he said. “It’s a major change in the way the Cuban economic system will work.

It will be felt by every Cuban.” But, he added, “they still want to maintain state control. We’ll see how this plays out.” The real test of Cuba’s latest experiment will be in how it is implemented and whether work will have a correlation with wealth, Professor Henken and other experts said. Under previous privatization campaigns, he said, “people were so hobbled by regulations that self-employment was rife with illegality and corruption .”

And as Ms. Sanchez, the blogger, noted, entrepreneurs had to be wary, as all Cubans are, of the secret police, given the regime’s attitude toward private property and enterprise in general. Whatever changes may unfold, none of the power brokers in Cuba were calling the new system capitalism, and most close observers don’t expect them ever to use that word .

As Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it: “Overhauling their model does not necessarily mean they are importing ours.”