Cuba and Venezuela open up, hesitantly, to the market

“DEEP DOWN, we are one single government, one single country,” said Venezuela’s loquacious president, Hugo Chávez, of the relationship with Cuba in 2007. Fidel Castro, Cuba’s ailing revolutionary leader, was like a father to him. Venezuela provided millions of barrels of subsidised oil to shield Cuba from the economic consequences of its socialist system. Cuban doctors served Venezuela’s poorest neighbourhoods, boosting Chávez’s popularity and providing Cuba with extra cash. Cuban spies schooled Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, who became president after he died in 2013, in the dark arts of perpetual rule. Their political and economic alliance was the strongest in Latin America.

Now the allies are discreetly sharing another experience: adoption of free-market practices to rescue their moribund economies. Neither admits this. The goal, each claims, is “perfeccionamiento”—perfection—of socialism, not its abolition.