At the worst moment in the Cuban economy in nearly 30 years, the Communist Party Congress, marking Raúl Castro’s departure from power, will need to accentuate reforms aimed at greater openness to private enterprise.
The event, from April 16-19, comes at a critical time after the island’s economy plunged 11% in 2020, the biggest drop since 1993.
Since the beginning of this year, President Miguel Díaz-Canel has stepped on the accelerator with a major financial reform to address the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the strengthening of the US embargo and the country’s internal disruptions and imbalances .
The urgency “is not so much because the Eighth Congress is due to be held in a month, but rather that the economy is in a situation that I consider critical,” economist Omar Everleny told AFP. Pérez, of the Center for Reflection and Dialogue.
According to the constitution, the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) concentrates the largest power in the country and its congresses every five years, identifies and sets guidelines for the next five years.
But this calendar was not always fulfilled.
After the disaster caused by the disappearance of the communist bloc, 14 years elapsed between the Fifth Congress in 1997 and the Sixth in 2011, showing that there was no definition of how to reform the model.
– “Without a break but without hurry” –
The latter happened when Raúl Castro was already formally in control in 2008 and was first secretary of the PCC, a position he is now leaving.
Then he began a slow process of economic reforms on the Soviet-style model that had prevailed with his brother Fidel.
“Without pause but without haste,” Raúl Castro said at the time to justify the slowness of the reforms, called “updating the model”.
The historic leadership, which is about to retire at this convention, is leaving three roadmaps laying the foundations for economic and social policy, the design of the new model and a national development plan through 2030.
However, for Cuban economist Jacqueline Laguardia, the program was “carried out in a partial, incoherent and contradictory way until 2019”.
This year, the government has implemented a thorough monetary reform that has resulted in a veritable tsunami in the daily lives of the citizens.
In addition to the unification of their two currencies, the minimum wage and pensions were increased by 400 and 500%, but an inflation rate of at least 160% was also recorded.
And in an unprecedented move, Díaz-Canel decided in February to open up almost all economic activity to the private sector.
Now Cubans can commit to more than 2,000 types of jobs that until then were dominated by the state, which reserved only 124 areas.
For example, in a country with 11.2 million inhabitants, there are already about 600,000 Cubans working in private initiative, 13% of the economically active population.
The next step is the creation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the improvement of non-agricultural cooperatives, the government has moved forward without specifying deadlines.
– “Shortage of goods” –
“Many things have been left behind,” said Ricardo Torres, an expert at the University of Havana.
In addition to the unknown with regard to SMEs, there is still no talk of “how the expansion of the concept of mixed ownership becomes a reality. Neither has a bankruptcy law been passed, nor the corresponding legislation for the effective transformation of the state-owned enterprise”, adds he adds. Towers.
Nor has “the banking-financial system been modernized or diversified to accompany private sector or agricultural growth”.
Without forgetting that “the essential problem in Cuba is a shortage of goods”, especially food, says Omar Everleny Pérez.
80% of what is consumed on the island is imported and the queues people make to take care of themselves, which were already happening before the pandemic, have deteriorated.
A large number of Cubans have been waiting in front of supermarkets for hours every day since sunrise.
– “Market Socialism” –
The model “cannot continue with the political and ideological bias that society has had in the first 60 years of revolution,” said Pérez, calling for a look at Vietnam, a model he believes is better suited to Cuba than to the Chinese. .
Vietnam’s economic performance, with the same ideology as Cuba, is due to “the weight they have given the market and how they have incorporated it into the name of their model, a market socialism,” he adds.