Cuba weighs expanding small private businesses
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| Published on Thursday, July 29, 2010 |
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HAVANA, Cuba (AFP) -- Cuba's lawmakers on Wednesday mulled legalizing more small private businesses, perhaps expanding a limited program to include farm and food industries in the economically struggling communist nation, state media said.
Committees in the National Assembly were reviewing potential measures ahead of a keenly awaited address on Sunday by President Raul Castro.
The Cuban president, 79, is expected to outline social and economic policies, possibly including some significant changes.
In a country in which 95 percent of the economy is state-run, inefficiency is rampant and wages are woefully low, Cubans' hopes are running high that some change is coming to allow some economic opening in the Americas' only one-party communist regime.
Castro three months ago gave a green light for a test-run privatization of barber and beauty shops.
Under the limited program, the state rents now out shops to workers who used to live mainly on tips and work at home on off hours. Now stylists are able to set their own prices, and are working at improving service. Stylists pay for a license, their rent, social security plus electric and water bills.
Now, committees are looking at whether privatization can be expanded in food businesses, long plagued by insufficient supply, high prices, and major problems in the distribution chain from rampant theft to spoilage.
Castro took the reins from his ailing brother Fidel Castro four years ago, saying he wanted to boost production. But the Cuban government has not made bold policy shifts able to achieve the gains it wants.
So far the government has handed fallow land to Cubans willing to farm it; and has ended the equal scale for salaries for all workers across industries.
But workers still make an average of around 20 dollars a month.
And the government has left Cubans aghast at their potential fates, making it known that it may dismiss one million workers -- 20 percent of the work force. The economy does not currently have the ability to absorb such vast numbers of jobless. | | | | Reads : 798 | | | |
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