/RPT/CUBA-POLITICS: Party Congress Will Not Predict Economic Future

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 8 1997 (IPS) - The fifth congress of Cuba’s governing Communist Party, which opened Wednesday, will be unable to predict how much longer the economic crisis gripping the country since 1989 will last, according to a resolution presented to the 1,500 participants.

The congress will outline loose timetables for many of the objectives of the government’s development strategy, says an Economic Resolution. The document was presented to the delegates who in the name of the 770,000 party members will meet until Friday behind closed doors in the party’s most important forum.

The text, cited by the official daily ‘Granma’, says the stepping up of the U.S. economic war against Cuba and the conditions of the global economy make it impossible to set precise deadlines for the goals laid out by the government.

The document says it is “realistic” to expect the current restrictions in the sphere of external finances and the difficulties in the search for a solution to the foreign debt to continue or increase in the near future.

“Our own efforts are the key element in the design and execution of economic policy,” says the resolution, which adds on an optimistic note that the recovery of growth after “the severe and abrupt economic slump” is “unquestionable.”

This week’s congress is the second held since the start of the economic crisis, which brought a 34.8 percent drop in Gross Domestic Product from 1989 to 1993 and affected all spheres of life.

The fourth congress, which took place in October 1991, granted special powers to the 225-member Central Committee to enable it to face the crisis with agility and enhanced decision-making capacity.

Preceded by a broad public debate, the fourth congress introduced greater flexibility in the party programme, and although it maintained the single-party system, it broadened the party’s social base and modified the 1976 constitution.

In the past six years, this Caribbean island nation of 11 million inhabitants has experienced not only the effects of the crisis but also the gradual introduction of a package of reforms, many of which authorities have considered “undesireable but inevitable.”

The transformations have included the parallel circulation of the dollar and the peso, the expansion of self-employment, the handing over of public land to cooperatives and small farmers, and measures to clean up internal finances.

The government approved a law on foreign investment, as well as structural reforms in labour and the business and banking sectors, which began to go into effect in 1995.

In 1994, the effects of the reform were reflected in 0.4 percent growth of the economy, a figure that rose to 2.5 percent in 1995 and 7.8 percent last year.

But the economy will be affected this year by a drop in sugar production, which according to unofficial estimates fell from 4.4 to 4.2 million tonnes.

Cuba’s Economy and Planning Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez acknowledged this week that the U.S. Helms-Burton law pushed up the risk-country index, which has led to a slowdown in the inflow of foreign capital and a rise in the price of credit.

“It is possible that in a first reading of the Economic Resolution the need for greater precision could arise,” recognises Granma, while warning that “just aspirations are not always based on reality.”

According to the publication, the present situation does not allow for predictions of “the financial or material circumstances that will make it possible to support positive performance in production or services.”

The Economic Resolution projects continuity of the business sector reforms, and sets forth the political line in production, leadership, organisation, planning, administration and control of the economy. It also confirms the role of the state as the main regulator of the economy, and ensures that all past and future changes will preserve the soicalist essence of Cuba’s development model.