A Change’s Afoot

Our country has gone through it’s time of “change”, now it is Cuba’s turn have change in enormously important ways along the lines of government.  One of the changes in government regulations have been the legalizing of farmers selling their wares to the tourism industry, without mandating merchandise go through a government-run redistribution.  The most significant Cuban  governmental reform is the housing reform bill, bringing back the legal house market obliterated by Fidel Castro in the 1960s.  Fidel Castro made it legal for the government to seize homes, turning them into instant cash by forcing fees, paid monthly for decades.T he only legal way to change where you were living was to  swap houses with someone who had a house of roughly the same value.  Instead of being lucid, that bill was full of corruption and purposefully incoherent.  You also could not build or add onto your house without government consent, so many people either were not able to house their families, or chose not to have the families in the first place.

President Raul  Castro’s reform is to help their economy by cutting government spending, and permitting more private enterprise.  Light is breaking through some of the most infamous concrete curtains of communism left standing.  They are realizing the  top-down,communistic system is not what keeps an economy flourishing.Booming economies require booming trade, and plenty of market competition instead of one government powered company controlling an industry. Pres. Raul Castro is on an upward path, slowly redeeming his country- that is very slowly going about the redeeming.  Though this reform was a breakthrough, and the market is already vibrant, there still stands restrictions to who can buy and how many homes you can have (to prevent the accumulation of wealth, of course), and only Cuban nationals can buy them. There is also still a 4% tax on the price of the sale or the appraisal value set by a government-contracted architect, that being determined by which price is highest.

Praise the Lord, for President Castro realizes his brother was the downfall of Cuba.  This is especially mind-boggling, for Raul was Fidel’s ally during his dictatorship, as the Commander of Cuba’s armed forces.  Yet another land operating on a Ma'at system, falling apart with the loss of a Nam Lugal, and coming to grips under a new leader of less totalitarian tendencies.

President( Dictator)  Raul Castro, younger brother of Fidel Castro, takes office in Cuba.

Written by Lily Baker

Steve Jobs Remembered

  Steve Jobs, born on February 24, 1955, was adopted into a middle class family. He grew up in Silicon Valley and it was there that he met Stephen Wozniak. After dropping out of Reed College in Oregon after one semester he learned a lot about Eastern Mysticism and went to India to find Enlightenment at age 19. When Steve came home to the Valley he worked with Wozniak. They began Apple working in Steve's garage on a computer board. 
  
    His biological sister, Mona, would later say, "Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was." 


   Not only in his work was he hard working, but in his relationships with his wife and three children.   "When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored," says Mona. "His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still."


  He accomplished many things in his lifetime. He left his mark on personal computers with Apple and Macintosh, music with iTunes and iPod, phones with iPhone, and animation with Pixar. He was the college drop-out, hippie kid, who built an empire and became a multi-millionaire. He was fired from his own company, only to be brought back to save it ten years later. He brought change to millions of lives by making technology easy-to-use, exciting and beautiful. 


      Steve's final words were: "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."


  Read Mona Simpson's eulogy here.