Funny story, really. It turns out that Communism still doesn’t work. So much for fifty-one years of oppression and degrading lifestyle conditions. His bad.

But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said.

This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?

I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

Julia pointed out that one effect of such a sentiment might be to create space for his brother, Raul, who is now president, to enact the necessary reforms in the face of what will surely be push-back from orthodox communists within the Party and the bureaucracy. Raul Castro is already loosening the state’s hold on the economy. He recently announced, in fact, that small businesses can now operate and that foreign investors could now buy Cuban real estate. (The joke of this new announcement, of course, is that Americans are not allowed to invest in Cuba, not because of Cuban policy, but because of American policy. In other words, Cuba is beginning to adopt the sort of economic ideas that America has long-demanded it adopt, but Americans are not allowed to participate in this free-market experiment because of our government’s hypocritical and stupidly self-defeating embargo policy. We’ll regret this, of course, when Cubans partner with Europeans and Brazilians to buy up all the best hotels).

I’d certainly be more receptive to dropping the embargo if Cuba becomes serious about reforming its economic system. In which case we can talk about buying up hotels.

But there’s no reason to invest large sums of money in Cuba if the government can take property away and nationalize the company at any moment. Take reforms seriously and we drop the embargo.

As for Communism, it’s failed yet again. It failed in the Soviet Union, it failed in China, it failed in North Korea, and now even Fidel Castro concedes it has failed in Cuba. Now these countries are moving towards the free market, slowly but surely.

Meanwhile, the United States is moving towards socialism under the leadership of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. While the rest of the world realizes that government needs to shrink in size, we implement massive expansions of government. Craptastic .