from The Economist
[Raul Castro] was blunt about Cuba's economic problems...he blamed “our own shortcomings” for the fact that “often two plus two results in three.”
It's possible that Castro only meant that it's difficult to manage the budget of a Caribbean nation, but this utterance looks to me like a clever and literary riff on state communism. It's a sardonic reference to Orwell's 1984, where the main character is forced by a totalitarian government to agree that two and two make five.
"2+2=5" has become a worn-out trope, visible all over pop culture, signifying something about either looming mind control or resistance to logical thinking. Castro revives the cliché and rhetorically pronounces the end of international socialism.
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