Raul Castro, who recently took over Cuba after big brother Fidel decided to inch a little closer to the grim reaper’s tentative grasp, has made some so-called sweeping changes on the island. Well, okay, he shipped in some Chinese electronics.

There they were, piled up one atop another, Chinese-made rice makers selling for $70 each. Beside them, sleek DVD players. Across the well-stocked electronics store were computers and televisions and other household appliances that President Raúl Castro recently decreed ought to be made available to average Cubans, or at least those who could afford them.

Minor caveat! That would be almost no one, right?

Mr. Castro’s early tinkering has already laid bare an uncomfortable, and potentially destabilizing, reality in a country that for 50 years has been run as one of the world’s most rigid socialist systems: that some Cubans are far better off than others, whether because of remittances from relatives abroad, ties to the ruling class or unauthorized money-making ventures on the side.

Indeed, while the Cuban administration is clinging to its “perfect socialist” ideals, people in the street are all, fuuuuck. We can’t afford this shit.

Javier, a 25-year-old computer programmer, has made up his mind to leave Cuba for California as soon as he can. “Come on, these changes are only in favor of a very tiny part of the population,” he said, sitting along a coastal wall and staring into the ocean. “We, who get up early in the morning to get the bus, we, who have sacrificed ourselves, we can’t afford all this,” he added. “I’d love to go to a fancy hotel with my girlfriend for a night or two. But, hey, I simply can’t. I couldn’t afford it, even in my dreams.”

And when a young Cuban man is not free to get laid by his girlfriend, none of us are free.