At the worst moment in the Cuban economy for nearly 30 years, the Communist Party congress, which marks Raúl Castro’s departure from power, will have to step up reforms aimed at greater openness to private enterprise.
The event, between April 16-19, comes at a critical time, after the island’s economy shrank by 11% in 2020, the largest decline since 1993.
Earlier this year, President Miguel Díaz-Canel pressed the accelerator with a deep financial reform to deal with the crisis arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, the strengthening of the US embargo and the country’s internal distortions and imbalances.
The urgency “is not so much because the eighth congress will take place in a month, but rather because the economy is in a situation that I categorize as critical,” he told economist Omar Everleny for AFP. Pérez, from the Center for Reflection and Dialogue.
According to the Constitution, the Communist Party of Cuba (CCP) concentrates the country’s largest power and its congresses every five years, takes stock and sets guidelines for the next five years.
But this timetable has not always been met.
After the disaster caused by the disappearance of the communist bloc, 14 years passed between the fifth congress in 1997 and the sixth in 2011, which showed a lack of definition of how to reform the model.
– “No pause, but no hurry” –
The latter occurred when Raúl Castro took over the reins of the country in 2008 and was the first secretary of the CCP, a position he is now leaving.
Then he began a slow process of economic reform on the Soviet-style model that prevailed with his brother Fidel.
“Without pause, but without haste,” Raúl Castro said at the time to justify the slow pace of reforms, called “updating the model.”
The historical leadership, about to withdraw from this congress, leaves the legacy of three roadmaps that lay the foundations for economic and social policy, the design of the new model and a national development plan by 2030.
However, for Cuban economist Jacqueline Laguardia, by 2019, the program was “implemented in a partial, disjointed and contradictory way.”
This year, the government launched a profound monetary reform that led to a real tsunami in the daily lives of citizens.
In addition to the unification of their two currencies, the minimum wage and pensions were increased by 400 and 500%, but inflation of at least 160% was also recorded.
And in an unprecedented step, Díaz-Canel decided in February to open almost all economic activities to the private sector.
Now, Cubans can pursue more than 2,000 types of jobs dominated by that state, which has reserved only 124 areas.
Thus, there are about 600,000 Cubans already working in private initiative, 13% of the economically active population, in a country of 11.2 million inhabitants.
The next step will be the creation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and the improvement of non-agricultural cooperatives, the government has advanced without specifying deadlines.
– “Lack of goods” –
“A lot of things are left behind,” says Ricardo Torres, an expert at the University of Havana.
In addition to the unknown about SMEs, there is still no talk “about how to expand the concept of mixed ownership. Neither a bankruptcy law has been adopted nor the appropriate legislation for the effective transformation of the state-owned company,” he added. he. Towers.
Nor has “the financial-banking system been modernized or diversified to accompany the growth of the private sector or agriculture.”
Not to mention that “the key problem in Cuba is the lack of goods,” especially food, says Omar Everleny Pérez.
80% of what is consumed on the island is imported and the queues that people make to supply themselves, which are already repeated before the pandemic, have worsened.
A large number of Cubans wait long hours in front of supermarkets every day at dawn.
– ‘Market socialism’ –
The model “cannot continue with the political and ideological trend that society had in the first 60 years of the revolution,” says Pérez, who asks to look at Vietnam, a model that he considers better suited to Cuba than the Chinese.
Vietnam’s economic achievements, with the same ideology as Cuba, are due to “the weight they have given to the market and the way they have included, in the name of their model, a market socialism,” he added.