What's Castro up to with his confession of communism's failure?

Fidel Castro stunned the world this week by admitting socialism had failed in Cuba. The implication of the dictator's statement is unclear, but one thing isn't: Castro's sycophants have some explaining to do.

Castro, now 84 and semi-retired, made a surprisingly lucid admission about how 52 years of communist dictatorship have ruined his country. "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he casually told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter he summoned to Havana to tell him his thoughts.

Castro made other noteworthy statements to the reporter — that he regretted urging the Soviet Union to rain nuclear war on the U.S. in 1962, and that he wanted Iran's leader to stop slandering the Jews. But nothing was as arresting as the statement that his life work, the communism he forced on Cuba in 1959 was, in truth, a miserable failure.

Castro's motives in stating the obvious are still unclear. He may be desperate for attention. Or, having turned his country into an impoverished hellhole, he may want the U.S. trade embargo to end.

Cuba scholar Humberto Fontova notes that Castro has made similar offhand statements in the past, and none had any consequences.

Under the title "Dumb and dumber," a prof schools Hillary

Hillary Clinton, in a recent address at the Brookings Institution: "The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [the U.S. is] -- whether it's individual, corporate or whatever the taxation forms are...Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere, and guess what --- they're growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty."

Economics Prof. Ralph R. Reiland, in a piece titled Dumb and Dumber, responded in the American Spectator:

"In fact, Brazil doesn't have the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba wins that race to fully bloated statism and excessive confiscation of income and wealth. And guess what --- they're not growing like crazy and there's still a shortage of fish even though the country is surrounded by water.

Fishing isn't easy, explains Nick Miroff, a correspondent who covers Cuba for GlobalPost.com, when "Cuba's communist government is so paranoid about illegal departures to the United States that it strictly controls who can own or use boats."

Imagine a nice day on the water. You're nothing, a peon, and the government is everything. You're on a dinky raft held together by some inner tube strips from a '59 Chevy, trying to hook a fish for dinner when some gun-toting government enforcers pull up in a speed boat. "Hey, nutso," they holler (that's "estar mal de la azotea" in Spanish, i.e., "to be off one's nut"), "you a mental case, crazy enough to try to escape to the U.S. hell from the workers' paradise?"

Then the water cops confiscate your fishing rod and you feel lucky that you weren't dropped in a dungeon for 10 years for excessive individualism and trying to steal a sea trout from the people.

Hillary also got it wrong about Brazil growing fast by way of excessively squeezing the rich and by having the highest tax-to-GDP rate. The top marginal tax rate on income in Brazil is 27.5 percent, a substantially lower rate than the 35 percent (and soon to be 39.6 percent) top rate in the United States.

Similarly, the top corporate tax rate in Brazil is 34 percent, lower than the combined federal and state corporate tax of 39.1 percent in the United States, the second-highest rate in the industrialized world (only Japan's 39.5 percent combined rate is higher than the U.S. rate, but 24 states in the U.S. have a combined corporate tax rate higher than top-ranked Japan). 

In other words, if Hillary Clinton is saying that the U.S. should copy Brazil's tax structure in order to get the economy moving and stimulate job creation, that would mean a cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate and a one-third cut in the top U.S. income tax rate, the opposite of her call for higher taxes on the rich.

More broadly, Mrs. Clinton is ignoring the volumes of evidence that show a negative correlation between tax hikes and economic growth.

An enlightened Cuba would sack Castro and set up a "Welcome New American-Cubans" bureau

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- Cuba’s hotels could manage a sudden influx of 1 million American tourists if the U.S. Congress lifts its 47-year ban on travel to the Communist island, Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero said.

Additionally, the Caribbean nation is set to expand its capacity of about 50,000 rooms, with groundbreaking scheduled for at least nine hotels in 2010, Marrero said. About 200,000 rooms may be added in the “medium to long-term,” he said. Cuba is also seeking investment partners for 10 golf courses and luxury hotels aimed at Americans, according to a ministry official.

“I’m convinced that today, with the available capacity, we could be receiving the American tourists without any problem,” Marrero said in an interview yesterday in Cancun, Mexico where he was attending a conference of 40 American and Cuban tourist industry representatives.

The tourism industry meeting comes as the U.S. Congress considers a law that would lift the ban on travel to Cuba.

Rep. Diane Watson, D-CA, rips. Rush Limbaugh, lauds Fidel Castro and Cuba's health care system