Getting your player ready...
HAVANA — Cuba announced Monday that it will cast off at least half a million state workers by early next year and reduce restrictions on private enterprise to help them find jobs — the most dramatic step yet in President Raul Castro’s push to remake employment on the communist-run island.
Castro suggested during a nationally televised address on Easter Sunday that as many as 1 million workers — about one in five — may be redundant. But the government had not laid out specific plans to slash its workforce, and the speed and scope of the coming cutbacks were astounding.
Cuba’s official workforce is 5.1 million, meaning nearly 10 percent of employees could soon lose a government job.
