News SOS for Journalists Latin America Culture

Photos Photo of the Day Videos

Cuban Gov. to Cut Ministries as it Resists More Sanctions

HAVANA TIMES – Cuba’s Council of Ministers decided on Saturday to reduce the country’s Ministries from 27 to 21, supposedly in order to eliminate the bureaucracy that for decades has suffocated the national economy.

The easy excuse of the United States embargo has never disappeared, nor will it disappear, but bureaucratic obstacles have for many years hampered any attempt for us to resemble the rest of the world. We’ve remained trapped in a project that is going nowhere, because for a long time now Cuba’s harsh reality hasn’t merely knocked at the door — it simply opens it and walks in without asking permission.

Now, a draft Law on the Organization of the Central State Administration in some way reflects what citizens and economists have been denouncing for years.

Our beloved Prime Minister Manuel Marrero is now running headfirst into reality and acknowledging the structural failure, perhaps far too late.

According to him, this is an opportunity to reorganize and make better use of existing human resources. However, to me it sounds more like another cheap strategy to buy time — exactly what they have been doing for decades by tossing out crumbs, which they sometimes even take back when they are no longer convenient or no longer need them to be in the hands of the people.

The reform, which would be debated in July in the National Assembly, involves the elimination or merger of six entities within the central state apparatus, although it has not yet been specified which ones will disappear or how the restructuring will be carried out.

Coincidentally, this same week the United States placed on a blacklist and sanctioned the most powerful business conglomerate in Cuba, under........

© Havana Times