It's common knowledge, at least to those that understand the laws of the marketplace, that there’s “no such thing as a free lunch.”

But in the socialist worker’s paradise of Cuba, apparently there has been a “free” lunch to go along with the “free” education and healthcare. Really.

Unfortunately though, the “free” lunch is coming to an end in the mythical and quaint island where logic, market rules and even time stands still, according to this AFP article.

Reading these articles is painful and baffling.

[c]astro, you see, performed the miracle of turning lack of freedom into a free lunch through steadfast revolutionary will, but now the evil laws of the free market system are forcing his pragmatic prince of a brother to stop the “free” lunches.

Journalist-activists-dreamers who got their world view from Lennon’s “Imagine” like to believe in a world full of unicorns, egalitarianism, stimulus packages,  cash for clunkers and “free lunches”. But there’s nothing free in the real world, specially in Cuba. And the price of the “free” lunch has been 50 years of suffering, repression and about 150,000, (and counting), dead in Latin America.

Maybe they just don’t know what free means?