Cuba's changes: what would Che say?

It is hard to imagine what Che Guevara, the legendary communist revolutionary, would make of Cuba's plan to lay off 500,000 state workers by 2011 as the island moves closer to a market economy.Since his death in 1967 at the hands of US-backed forces in Bolivia, Guevara's iconic image has been used to sell everything from soda pop to cheap Chinese made t-shirts. Even symbols of socialism have great commercial value, suggesting the philosophies that motivated Guevara resonate on some level with a wide variety of people. Given this "revolutionary" legacy, market reforms might not spell the end for Cuban socialism, which has outlasted ten US presidents since the 1959 revolution. "Che would have understood that Cuba exists in the real world," Isaac Saney, a Marxist scholar and author of Cuba: A Revolution in Motion, told Al Jazeera. "You have to be able to live within your means and the state sector itself can no longer carry people who are not involved in productive activities."  Presently, Cuba's socialist government employs about 90 per cent of the labour force, according to John Kirk, a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, who has worked as a translator for Aleida Guevara, Che's daughter. "You'll often have two or three bus drivers sharing the work of driving one bus … the bottom line is that the Cuban economy is not efficient," Kirk told Al Jazeera.

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