CUBA-POLITICS: Congress Proposes Drastic Cut in Central Committee

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 10 1997 (IPS) - The leaders of Cuba’s governing Communist Party dealt a major blow to bureaucracy in its own ranks Friday, proposing a drastic cut in the number of members sitting on the Central Committee.

The party’s second secretary, minister of the armed forces Raul Castro, proposed slashing the party’s leadership organ from the current 225 members to 150, leaving a ratio of one representative for every 5,200 party members.

“Smaller, more agile leadership bodies capable of being convened on short notice to quickly adopt the necessary decisions” are needed today, said General Raul Castro, President Fidel Castro’s brother.

Approving the new Central Committee, which in its turn is to elect the party’s select 25-member Political Bureau, are two of the most important tasks of the fifth congress of the Communist Party, which met Wednesday through Friday in Havana.

The 1,500 delegates to the congress, who represent 780,000 party members, approved a political and an economic resolution that outline the strategy to be followed by Cuba over the next five years.

But above and beyond the proposed changes in the Central Committee, observers say that while the fourth congress in 1991 marked the country’s economic reorientation, this week’s meeting will go down in history for its confirmation of “continuity” – of socialism, the single-party system and the State as the guiding force of the economy.

Political sources say that although the government of Fidel Castro will be willing to make concessions on the economic front in order to overcome the hard-hitting crisis that has already lasted eight years, in politics it will not budge on either socialism or the single-party system.

But whether or not the 71-year-old president will abandon any of his other leadership posts – he also heads the Communist Party and the councils of State and Ministers, and is commander-in-chief of the armed forces – is not yet clear.

“We are studying all experiences and are open to all possibilities – except that of giving up,” the president said in the nearly seven hour-long improvised speech that replaced his traditional written report as first secretary of the party.

The congress was held at a difficult time for Cuba, due to a poor sugar harvest, increased internal economic tension, the stiffening of the 36-year U.S. economic embargo, and a series of bombings of installations in the tourism sector, which had outstripped sugar as the country’s leading foreign exchange earner.

Castro said that since the collapse of the east European socialist bloc, Washington has been able to concentrate its hostility on this small Caribbean island nation. The United States is engaged in an “economic and political war” against Cuba, he added.

But he acknowledged two positive gestures by Washington in the past few months: the condemnation of the recent hotel bombings and the handing over to authorities here of two Cubans who had hijacked a coast-guard vessel.

The congress dedicated most of its time to debating the country’s economic situation and future outlook.

With a foreign debt of around 11 billion dollars and the added risk presented by the U.S. Helms-Burton law, designed to tighten the embargo, Cuba has found itself cut off from access to the soft credits necessary for maintaining the timid recovery of the economy.

In this situation, described as “extremely critical” by local analysts and authorities, the congress ratified the 1991 decision to extend exceptional powers to the Central Committee to bolster its decision-making capability and ability for quick action. But for the Central Committee to be able to exercise those functions, it must be smaller, Raul Castro stressed.

With respect to one of the population’s main concerns, economic performance, the president said in his speech that Gross Domestic Product this year would grow two or three percent. Experts say the viability of Cuba’s socialist system is directly linked to the government’s capacity to maintain growth and leave the crisis behind.

Continuity of the economic reforms will play an essential role in that process. The reforms will apparently maintain their slow, cautious pace, which authorities consider a guarantee of political and social stability.

The economic resolution approved by the congress states that self-employment “will be maintained within the established framework of legality, within which it acts as a positive factor for the economy.”

Future reforms will mainly concentrate on perfecting state enterprises and introducing the mechanisms necessary for bringing their efficiency up to par with that of the emerging sector, formed by associations of mixed capital.

The congress also approved a resolution on “the party of the unity, democracy and human rights that we defend,” a document that was submitted to the consideration of more than six million of the country’s 11 million inhabitants, and which Raul Castro described as a “plebiscite” in favour of the single-party socialist system.

On Saturday, funeral rites will be held in Havana for Argentine- Cuban guerrilla leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and a group of his comrades who were also killed in Bolivia. The ceremonies will stretch to Oct. 17.

The fifth congress was planned to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Che’s death and the anniversary of the first independence uprising against Spanish colonialism, in order to demonstrate the historical continuity of Cuba’s revolutionary process.