TIMESONLINE: Something remarkable is happening in Cuba this week. Ordinary citizens are queuing outside electrical shops to buy DVD players and microwaves. They are venturing into fancy hotels and on to beaches previously reserved for western sun-seekers. Soon they will be able to buy mobile telephones.
Under Fidel Castro all such activities were banned. Cubans were second-class citizens in their own land, forced to watch as the cash-strapped regime allowed foreign tourists freedoms it denied its own people.
But five weeks after Raúl Castro, 76, succeeded his ailing elder brother, Cuba's new president is implementing reforms that, though they hardly amount to a Cuban perestroika, would have been scarcely imaginable under El Comandante.
To boost agricultural production small private farmers have been invited to plant coffee, tobacco and other crops on unused state land. More than half of Cuba's agricultural land lies fallow.
On Monday it quietly lifted the much-resented ban on Cubans using tourist hotels, renting cars or enjoying some of the Caribbean island's finest beaches - what human rights groups labelled "tourism apartheid".
From Tuesday it relaxed controls on the purchase of consumer goods, allowing shops to sell computers, motorbikes, flat-screen televisions and a range of home appliances previously unattainable except on the black market.
Raúl Castro's Government has also lifted its ban on the private ownership of mobile telephones, though they have yet to appear in shops. Cuba is one of the few countries in the world where the trill of a mobile is still rare. Cubans Finally Join Consumer Revolution >>> By Martin Fletcher | April 4, 2008
Mark Alexander
