Cuba has announced plans to lay off huge numbers of state employees in the biggest shift to the private sector since the revolution in 1959. The Cuban labour federation said half a million jobs would go by March, and the total redundancies could exceed a million, one in five of all Cuban workers. James Read reports.

President Raul Castro had already signaled that he wanted to reduce the role of the state to tackle a deep crisis in Cuba's socialist economy, but the scale and speed of the job cuts are much greater than had been expected. A minority of Cubans already work for themselves, and there is a thriving black economy. But the private sector will have to expand hugely to create enough new jobs. In a country famous for its revolution, this is a dramatic change of course.