Cuba's future

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     Now that we have gotten past the discussion
of elections and Cuba, I would like to raise a couple
of other issues.
     The first has to do with a chart I saw in the back
of a recent issue of The Economist (same issue with
Gus Hall obit and Survey on Mexico).  It showed Cuba
as one of several countries where rates of child
undernourishment have sharply increased in the last
20 years, from almost zero to nearly 20%.  There are
others that are much worse (Somalia, Haiti, and North
Korea were at the top of the list, with rates well over
50%), but this put Cuba as worse than India and some
other places that surprised me.
       Is this due to the cutback in oil supplies from the
former USSR?   If so, what does this say about the
success of the new "green agriculture" in Cuba?  Is
it classic "socialist inefficiency in agriculture"?  \
Whassup?
      The other is now that it increasingly looks like indeed
that Bush will "triumph" (if that is the right word) in Florida,
what will his presidency mean for Cuba's future?  The
obvious expectation would be that it means a hard line,
given both that Jeb is governor of Florida and how crucial
that state has proven in the presidential election and the
now likelihood that we shall see even more lackey-like
bootlicking of the obnoxious Cuban-Americans in Miami.
       OTOH, given the increasing pressure from a lot of
American capitalists to loosen further the embargo, might
we see the Dubya pulling a "Nixon in China" routine and
ending the embargo?
Barkley Rosser