Joe Garcia, a former executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, likes to joke about the chat he might have today with the late Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the powerful anti-Castro exile lobby.

Garcia says he would tell Mas Canosa that Cuba’s rulers have abandoned their dream of an egalitarian utopia, and that even Fidel Castro had confessed that his model of sub-tropical communism “does not work.”

He would add that Raúl Castro is now allowing Cubans to start more small businesses, recognizing their right to sell homes and vehicles and even embracing foreign investments in those icons of capitalism — golf resorts.

“Jorge would immediately say, ‘It’s over. We won!’” said the smiling Garcia, a South Florida Democrat who keeps tabs on developments in Cuba and has made two unsuccessful bids for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Castro critics would disagree strongly and portray the changes as nothing more than lipstick on the rotting corpse of a Soviet-styled economy. Raúl Castro himself timidly calls the changes not “reforms” but “updates” and has vowed to keep central planning as the backbone of the island’s economy and prevent any accumulation of private wealth.

Yet the changes clearly reflect an ambitious effort to address the structural flaws of Cuba’s communist system, abandon its culture of paternalism and attack its parasitic bureaucracy — without risking the government’s power to repress dissent.

In a nutshell, Castro’s goal is to slash a bloated state sector that controls an estimated 80 percent of the economy, and to allow more space for small-scale enterprises that can produce more efficiently, pay taxes to the government and often can count on financial support from relatives or friends abroad.

It’s not been easy. Pushback from entrenched ideologues and bureaucrats appears to have undercut some of the changes, and cuts in the ration cards that provide basic food items at highly subsidized prices have pummeled Cuba’s neediest.

A Catholic church in Havana reported a hefty increase in the number of people at its free lunches in recent months. And the government reportedly stopped disability and other aid payments to about 3,000 people in the city of Santa Clara this year.

But many reforms are under way, and the pace of change increased after a congress of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba in April gave a broad endorsement to Castro’s 300-plus proposals for change.

SLOWLY UNDOING NATIONALIZATION

Perhaps the most important reform for the average Cuban was the decision in 2010 to permit an expansion of private economic activity in a country that nationalized every single business in 1968, down to push carts that sold hamburgers.

Today, 357,000 people have licenses for “self-employment” — in tightly controlled categories such as party clowns and street vendors of music CDs — and most have incomes well above the official average salary of $20 a month.

For the first time this year, private entrepreneurs were allowed to hire employees — previously “the exploitation of man by man” — rent some state-owned storefronts and even list their services in the island’s phone book, which once rejected them as too “consumerist.”

Many state-owned businesses, such as locksmiths, carpentry shops and repair centers for electrical appliances such as rice cookers, will be turned into private businesses, according to an official announcement a month ago.