Business at the family restaurant in La Lisa, an outlying district of Havana, is visibly down these days. The five tables in the home’s beautiful garden used to be filled with Cuban families and couples, as there are few tourists or foreigners in the area. Asked if the now mainly empty tables were due to the Bush administration’s recent limits on family travel and remittances, the owner said no – “Bush hurt, but this is Fidel and Raul”.

Relatively flush with cash from the export of medical and other services, mainly to Venezuela, and with the inevitable end of their decades-long rule now in sight, the Castro brothers have decided to do something about the state bureaucracy’s penchant for embezzling funds and diverting resources to the black market, and the pilfering by workers that goes on in many workplaces.