CHRISTOPHER BODEEN writes:

Visiting a China transformed by capitalist-style economic development, Cuban leader Fidel Castro said Thursday he hardly recognized the country that is one of his ailing nation's few remaining communist allies. Castro, the world's longest-serving communist leader, said China's advances left him amazed.

Maybe you should try economic reforms, Fidel. Although I'm afraid the Americans won't trade with you unless you start democratic reforms.

update
Bodeen later writes:

As Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in 1959, China was in the throes of an ultimately catastrophic push toward converting all private farms to communes. Yet while the Cuban leader stuck doggedly to his communist guns, China over the past decades junked such dreams of utopia and transformed a vast, agrarian state into one of the world's chief market economies. For the 76-year-old Castro, who last visited China seven years ago, the difference was bewildering....China and Cuba are two of the last remaining one-party communist states, but the similarity just about ends there. Cuba muddles on with a planned communist economy still reeling from the loss of Soviet subsidies. Meanwhile, China has become aggressively mercantile, growing into the world's manufacturing powerhouse. Its cities are littered with new high-rises, their streets clogged with vehicles.