Cuba to do away with 50-year invariable secured employment

In a significant easing of state-control over nearly all facets of Cuban economy, Cuban leader Raul Castro has announced that his government will alleviate or scale back its controls on small businesses, lay off unnecessary workers, and allow more self-employment.

In his summary address to the Fifth Plenary Session of the Seventh National Assembly of People's Power (ANPP) at Havana's Convention Center, Raul Castro, President of the Cuban Council of State and President (or Premier) of the Council of Ministers of Cuba, said that the role of the state would be reduced in some areas.

Raul made it clear on Monday that his government will do away with half-a-century invariable secured employment and urgent measures will be taken to cut the "overloaded" state payroll. Among other measures, he said, the Cuban government is to reduce staff of the state-owned institutions, to ease or alleviate its control in service sectors, to encouraging self-employment, to allow certain commodities trading, and to open up the labor service market.

Meanwhile, President Raul Castro reiterated that Cuban will adjust and further improve its socialist economic growth mode in strict compliance with its set policy, and its economic setup optimization will neither be done rashly or in haste nor given in to pressure from outside.

According to figures Cuba has released, the state-owned sector accounts for the majority of the national economy and its able-bodied population has amounted to 4.9 million, some 20 percent of which are those redundant staff members in government departments. Currently, there are up to 1.3 million staffers hired in the most developed public education and health sectors, who currently consume 60 percent of the Cuban budget. And there are also acute labor shortages in the construction and agriculture sectors.

In contrast with the situation 14 years ago, noted Vice-President Jose Ramon Fernandez Alvarez of the Cuban Council of Ministers, the ranks of teachers in Cuban rose by 117,000, whereas the students body has trimmed by 1.1 million, and there is an imbalance or an unsymmetrical phenomena between the establishments and actual needs. Hence, the government would cancel tens of thousands of faculty jobs in the education sector as of September.

Noting that the secured employment and rigid job management have resulted in the overstaffing and a low efficiency, Raul pledged that Cuba will not take an indulgent attitude so that the Cuban people will have, through their honorable work, "sufficient resources for a decent life."

In order to make adequate, appropriate arrangements for those lay-off employees from the state-owned departments, the Cuban government has approved the specific self-employment tax system. This system, President Raul Castro added, will "provide a new way out" for the workers to re-employ in the future.

Speaking to reporters before Raul Castro's speech, Minister of Economy and Planning Marino Alberto Murillo Jorge said that while the state would reduce its role in small business, the Cuban government will continue to direct a centralized economy. "We are studying an updating of the Cuban economic model in which the economic priorities will be at the forefront, not the market," he said.

A scheme launched in April this year under which some hairdressers are to work for themselves is likely to be extended to many other areas, according to BBC's Michael Voss, in Havana.

Regardless of what required adjustment measures the government has resorted to, they will never alter the nature of the Cuban economy, Minister Murillo explained, and these adjustments will only optimize its socialist nature instead of changing the attribution of the public ownership since the Cuban government has only "let loose hands and feet" appropriately in some aspects.

In another development, after half a century of icy bilateral relations between the two countries, Cuba and the United States had resumed direct talks on migration and on re-establishing direct mail service in 2009.

On the subject of Cuban-US bilateral ties, President Raul Castro harshly denounced the policy of the U.S. government toward Cuba although he acknowledged that both sides have been conducted dialogues on certain "limited" topics. Fundamentally speaking, he said the U.S.-Cuban relations have not undergone any change. Moreover, he underscored that the Cuban government and people are now united as one, and said this kind of unity has "led us to arrive today from the past and proceed to go on building and further improving socialism in the future."

The National Assembly of the People's Power, or ANPP, is the highest form of state power in Cuba; it convenes two regular meetings every year. And a series of economic structural adjustment programs determined at the current plenum of the General Assembly is of great practical significance of extricating Cuba from its current economic predicament as soon as possible and successfully opening up fresh and brand-new prospects for the nation's economic development.

By People's Daily Online and its author is PD resident reporter in Cuba Zou Zhipeng