Cuba seeks more user-friendly socialism

By Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) - New President Raul Castro has lifted some of Cuba's more onerous restrictions and opened cracks in one of the world's remaining state-run economies to make socialism more user-friendly.

How far the small-scale reforms will go remains anybody's guess, but in the past five weeks, Castro has introduced changes at what amounts to lightning speed by Cuban standards.

Bans on the sale of computers, DVD players and other products have been lifted, and Cubans who can afford it can now stay at tourist hotels and buy a cellphone.

Agriculture is being decentralized, farmers can decide for themselves what supplies they need and the prices paid to them are rising to boost food production.

It became clear after Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro underwent intestinal surgery in 2006 and temporarily handed over power to his brother Raul Castro that change would come to the Soviet-style economy.

The younger Castro unleashed a Cuban version of Soviet "glasnost" by ordering the official media to investigate social and economic problems, demanding that bureaucrats tell the truth, calling on Cubans to be more critical and fostering a grass-roots debate on the country's ills.

With Fidel Castro too ill to return to power, the 76-year-old Raul Castro formally took over as president on February 24, becoming Cuba's first new leader in half a century, and immediately promised to lift excessive regulations.

Unlike the "special period" of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's former benefactor, forced Fidel Castro to introduce limited free-market reforms to confront dire economic hardship, Cuba is not currently being pushed into reform by economic circumstances.