Ambitious reforms await enactment
By Gerardo Arreola
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
HAVANA – On paper, a new cycle of economic reforms in Cuba paints an ambitious horizon of potential expansion of the private sector and greater stimuli for agriculture. But although the decisions were approved months ago, they have not been enacted. The dates of application are unknown.
The pace of the economic changes on the island has been indecipherable so far. There is no way to translate into ordinary language how many weeks, months, or years are meant by the official line of “proceeding without haste but without pause.”
Vice President Marino Murillo, the reform’s principal manager, said in late March that “what was ordained so far has been done, and what is ordained until 2015 has a timetable and will be done exactly as planned.”
However, neither the projection of the economy until 2015 nor the reform’s timetable has been made public.
In April 2011, the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba approved the formation of cooperatives outside the farm and cattle industries – so far the only legal cooperatives – as well as alliances between them to create “second-level” collectives.
The decision allowed technicians and professionals to form production and service enterprises in the cities. Such a step could trigger an expansion of the private sector in a more vigorous form than “self-employed labor,” which is limited to 181 trades of low productive value.
The Congress also broadened the practice of leasing idle land in usufruct. According to the latest official figures, idle lands account for more than 1 million hectares, out of 6.5 million hectares of cultivable land.
According to Murillo, a decree will launch the system of cooperatives. Another decree will expand the amount of land that will be leased in usufruct, currently 13.42 hectares to private individuals without farm land, or enough to complete 40.26 hectares if they have farm land. The concession time will be increased from the current 10 years with possible extension.
“We must allow [the farmer] to stay active longer and the family to remain on the farm,” Murillo said.
However, no one knows when the new cooperatives will come into being or when a better offer of idle lands will be made.
In late March, the Council of Ministers received a report that would restructure the Ministry of Agriculture, which the report described as being “in an unfavorable economic and financial state for several years now.”
“The actions and measures adopted so far to revert this condition have been insufficient,” the report added.
One of the Ministry’s critical sectors has been under fire for a long time. Two years ago, the private farmers – who generate 70 percent of the production of food – asked for more freedom to sell their merchandise and demanded an in-depth review of the state’s monopoly on food distribution, known as “acopio.”
The debate over what to do with the “acopio” reached its broadest range of opinion in 2010, Murillo said, from tightening control over it to eliminating it outright. The party Congress decided to retain it, but gave the producers greater and direct access to the market.
In a report to Parliament, Murillo said at the time that once the farmers could sell their products directly to the consumers, such as hotels, “that structure that we have in the middle, providing inefficient commercialization, will fall apart little by little.”
Direct sales to the hotels were begun, but “acopio” continues to function in the rest of the chains of distribution, and nobody knows what will happen to the Ministry of Agriculture.
The plan to eliminate half a million jobs between late 2010 and the first quarter of 2011 was halted. Perhaps the Cuban economy was unable to deal with such an unemployment shock.
According to official figures, 140,000 jobs were terminated in 2011. One hundred and seventy thousand jobs are expected to end this year.
But those jobless people are not migrating en masse to the private sector, which in February had 371,000 micro-entrepreneurs, 70 percent of whom had not fixed employment. The trend seems to indicate that the new enterprises are really the black market coming into the open.
To broaden the possibilities of employment – as the cooperatives and the farm reforms would do – is necessary to give options to the army of unemployed.
This is most significant because a new fiscal law does have a fixed date for enactment: a law to impose more taxes will be approved by Parliament this summer.
