Thursday, June 12, 2008

Open floodgates (abren las compuertas)

Cuba wages will be tied to productivity

Salary caps will be eliminated in August

HAVANA

Recognizing the egalitarian goal of the island's socialist revolution as outdated, Cuba is moving ahead with a productivity-based wage system, a top labor official said Wednesday.

Carlos Mateu, a vice minister of labor and social security, said in an interview with the Community Party daily Granma that all state enterprises must eliminate salary caps by next month. Many have already done so.

The move contradicts the idea of an egalitarian society long promoted by ailing former president Fidel Castro, 81, who was officially replaced by younger brother Raul in February.

But Cuba's first new leadership in nearly 50 years has acknowledged that the socialist system was in danger without better economic results in areas from food production to worker productivity.

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"Either we solve the problems or we ourselves destroy the revolution that cost us so much blood and sweat," Maria del Carmen Concepcion, a top Communist Party official, was quoted as saying in the state press this week.

Mateu told Granma that "there has been a tendency for everyone to get the same, and that egalitarianism is not convenient. That is something we have to resolve." The vice minister could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

When everyone was equally poor then all desire was unfulfilled. As economic classes re-emerge in Cuba the true tyranny of poverty and oppression will once again raise its ugly head.


¡La revoluciĆ³n es muerta!


[Thanks to Luis M Garcia who blogs at Child of the Revolution for the insight.]



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