Cuba to import raw materials for small businesses

[Judi Lynn]

Cuba to import raw materials for small businesses
Updated: November 26, 2010, 02:57 PM


HAVANA (AP) - Cuba's government will spend about $130 million next year to import raw materials and equipment for independent businesses following its decision to allow some kinds of self-employment, officials said Friday.

In a bid to increase the efficiency of its cash-strapped economy, the communist government announced that it would lay off a half-million state workers and in October authorized 178 kinds of self-employment ranging from translator and teacher to shoe or watch repair.

Most of the newly permitted forms of self-employment require tools, equipment and infrastructure, Maria Victoria Coombs, director of employment at the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, told Communist Party newspaper Granma.

"The country will ensure, to the extent that it is possible, the supply of raw materials and supplies needed for self-employment," Granma reported Friday.

More:
http://www.buffalonews.com/business/24-hour-business-news/article265950.ece

[dipsydoodle]

1. Yup - that's what they need.

They'll have a perfectly adequate labour force and will just need the materials to put to good use.:thumbsup:

I'm guessing most of this stuff will come from China and the EU.

The US don't really need such exports. :sarcasm:

Good morning :hi:

[Judi Lynn]

2. Hey! You're right. The US just won't be interested in seeing Cuba trying to succeed. Nope.

They (politicians here) have done everything "humanly" possible to prevent it since the revolution, from the very first day, even sending people to blow up ships carrying Cuban sugar to sell elsewhere, or destroying their cargo, crops, livestock, etc., etc., etc., as well as all these long years of terrorism by schmucks from Florida, New Jersey, as well as the C.I.A.

You're right, they've got the labor force. This could be a big step. Unexpected.

[Billy Burnett]

5. Cuba has to pay cash up front for US products.

I would venture a guess that Cuba is the only nation the US trades with that results in a US trade surplus.

[dipsydoodle]

7. I'm guessing

that the Cuban government may set up some kind of funding agency for the purpose of providing credit to small businesses - with the government, at least for the time being , being the actual sole importer. That would also serve the useful purpose of controlling exactly what is coming in.

Your thoughts on the fact that Cuba may be the only nation with whom the US trades resulting in a US trade surplus is proably correct.

[Zorro]

12. And of course your ventured guess would be incorrect

[naaman fletcher]

3. Why not

Just let small businesses import what they want?

[dipsydoodle]

4. They lack the funds / exchangeable currency to do so

I have to assume you've not been there : you would otherwise not have asked the question.

The question is also quite arbitary until such small private enterprises exist next year sometime.

[naaman fletcher]

8. Oh

I didn't realize Castro was giving them the stuff. Anyway, no I have not been there but would like to go. Theoretically speaking as I would not break the law, how does one go there? Fly to mexico city and then to Cuba? Does Cuba stamp your passport?

[social_critic]

9. I'll fund businesses in Cuba

I'm a Cuban American. I'll fund businesses for my relatives in Cuba, and I don't need a government agency to tell me what type of business to have or what to import. If my ideas work, and my relatives there work hard, they can do quite well, and I get a return on my investment. But that's not what these guys have in mind, they are still trying to use a Soviet style command economy, with all knowing daddy government telling people what to do and how to do it. This is why communism fails, and this is why this new initiative will keep Cuba as an economic patient on CPR. They are still too dogmatic, communism is in their blood, and they won't accept the reality that free people doing business for themselves are much more efficient that government controlled business. Oh well, we'll just have to wait another 10 years until they get the idea, and change. Meanwhile the Cuban people will keep on suffering.

[Billy Burnett]

6. Where would said small business get the credit needed?

Use of credit is just how business develops. Cuba has been essentially cut off from the global credit markets. Now there's ALBA.

Think of the deep shit the US would be in if there were no more credit available?

[social_critic]

10. Screw ALBA

The Venezuelans don't have the money to pay the xmas bonuses to their government workers. So forget ALBA, that's a Venezuelan funded operation with no cash to lend. The money can come from Cubans outside Cuba. We don't have to sit on our hands and wait for the gringos to let us do it, there's ways to move cash around. And if the US government doesn't like it, screw them. This is a Cuban helping Cuban thing, and many of us are ready to go help out - but we do want a return for our money, and we want our relatives to move ahead. And this is not acceptable to the communists running the island.

They're still married to outdated and failed marxist-leninist-castroite models. If they let us "exploit" the workers on the island, those workers will mostly be our own relatives, and any exploited worker we exploit will be better off anyway, we can afford to launch businesses paying 10 times what the government pays, make a profit, and get a decent return. But we can't have the communist bureaucracy suffocating commerce, telling us what's to be imported, or how to do things. That's the nature of capitalism. And if they don't like it, they can stuff their communist ideals, and keep on starving, until they are all running aruond in chancletas and eating tree bark.

[Judi Lynn]

11. Learn from Cuba, says World Bank

Learn from Cuba, Says World Bank
By Jim Lobe, IPS, 1 May 2001

WASHINGTON, Apr 30 (IPS) - World Bank President James Wolfensohn Monday extolled the Communist government of President Fidel Castro for doing "a great job" in providing for the social welfare of the Cuban people. His remarks followed Sunday's publication of the Bank's 2001 edition of 'World Development Indicators' (WDI), which showed Cuba as topping virtually all other poor countries in health and education statistics.

It also showed that Havana has actually improved its performance in both areas despite the continuation of the US trade embargo against it and the end of Soviet aid and subsidies for the Caribbean island more than ten years ago.

"Cuba has done a great job on education and health," Wolfensohn told reporters at the conclusion of the annual spring meetings of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). "They have done a good job, and it does not embarrass me to admit it."

His remarks reflect a growing appreciation in the Bank for Cuba's social record, despite recognition that Havana's economic policies are virtually the antithesis of the "Washington Consensus", the neo-liberal orthodoxy that has dominated the Bank's policy advice and its controversial structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) for most of the last 20 years.

Some senior Bank officers, however, go so far as to suggest that other developing countries should take a very close look at Cuba's performance.

More:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/185.html

[social_critic]

13. may 2001? Obsolete

It's almost 2011. Let's look at recent developments:

1. The Cuban regime morphed gradually, allowing more foreign investment into areas such as energy, mining, and tourism. The ventures are controlled so that workers are kept as if they were serfs, and can not get employed directly by the joint ventures.

2. As Venezuela benefits from increasing oil prices during the 2000's, it begins to subsidize the Cuban economy via cheap oil, payments for Cuban gastarbeiters who go to Venezuela to do work previously done by Venezuelans - and overpaid according to Venezuelan wage scales.

3. The Bush economic crisis of 2008 leads to a serious drop in tourism and demand for oil and other commodities, this hits both Venezuela, the sugar daddy, and Cuba itself. Therefore it's crunch time again, and Cubans begin to suffer. This eventually leads Castro to admit in an interview that communism as he invented it doesn't work even in Cuba. Later he apparently backtracks after he realizes he just shot his foot.

4. Raul Castro announces the Cuban regime is no longer able to keep the communist system working the way they had meant to, and that hundreds of thousands of workers will be laid off. They are going to be allowed to work in "capitalist units" with profits, employees, etc. But their communist mentality is still frozen in Stalin's USSR, so they intend to allow these unemployed workers to work and create their own mini companies, but their activities are to be regulated and suphocated in red-tape. Which means the move is going to fail.

The presence in society of hundreds of unemployed who struggle to break through the red-tape imposed by the ancient regime, whose oligarchs will try to maintain control and to extract value via corrupt methods, will be a volatile mix. I suspect that regime has less than five years left, and it will have to change to a more sensible socialist system, such as is used in Western European nations.

I know it's nice to quote UN statistics from 10 years ago to try to disguise the ugly trends, but the trends are there, and past "glories" are meaningless, especially when those "glories" were achieved by repression, cruelty, corruption, and near enslavement of people. The Castro regime is an abomination, a betrayal of the socialist cause. It is communism designed by an arrogant man who thought he understood everything, when the truth is he never even understood how to run a hot dog stand.

[Judi Lynn]

14. And we are supposed to believe this, from a person who invaded Cuba

at the Bay of Pigs, trying to kill Cubans protecting their country from the racist, brutal Bastiano supporting idiots they had driven out of office already?

Even then, those same murderous thugs in the invasion weren't taken prisoner and executed. They were all returned, clearly, going home to turn Miami into one corrupt, fraudulent politically, violent, racist town.

[Mika]

15. The nature of capitalism? ROFL

The nature of capitalism


The nature of capitalism


The nature of capitalism


The nature of capitalism



"but we do want a return for our money, and we want our relatives to move ahead."


I get it.

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