O fim do ornitorrinco?

Cuba slow to ease grip on shopkeepers

(Financial Times)

Three years after Cuba’s Rebel Youth newspaper published “The Big Old Swindle” – a scathing series calling for reform of a state-managed retail sector beset by poor management, corruption and abysmal service – debate is still raging over liberalisation. The authorities have yet to act.

Rumours abound in Havana that the state will soon cede control over its thousands of barber shops, cafeterias, bakeries and domestic appliance and car repair businesses, opting to regulate and tax rather than administer along the lines of the Chinese or Vietnamese model.

Yet the state appears to be doing the opposite, remodelling and opening numerous restaurants, shops and other retail outlets in city after city.

Raúl Castro, president, has insisted that Cuba’s Soviet-style command economy needs fixing. He has hinted that ways must be found to reform the retail sector since taking over from his ailing brother, Fidel Castro, two years ago.

“State companies must be efficient and so must have resources to be so. The rest should adapt to more adequate forms of property given the resources available,” stated a report by the economy ministry last year soon after Mr Castro replaced the minister and his top deputies.

Mr Castro has been short on specifics. However, commentators, economists and analysts propose raising the small number of family businesses and allowing employees to form co-operatives like those long established in agriculture.

There is apparently fierce resistance within the ruling Communist party, especially in the provinces.

“Cuba is not Havana,” a provincial-level party official in eastern Cuba quipped when asked to square the new government-run retail outlets with the idea that the state should get out of the sector.

Pressed, he conceded that the state did not need to run some services, such as every barber shop. But he opposed letting go of larger establishments, such as restaurants or car repair shops.

“Most cars and trucks in this country are owned by the state,” he said.

A mid-level party cadre who administered eateries in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba insisted the retail sector’s poor performance was not systemic but subjective. Fixing it was just a matter of improving party discipline, she said.

Cuba’s second city has opened more restaurants, bars, stores and other establishments over the past year than any other.

The administrator, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lazaro Exposito Canto, the province’s new party leader, had improved the sector. “Since his arrival the retail sector has been completely turned round. It is a matter of caring about the people and being demanding with subordinates,” she said.

The debate has spilled over into the pages of Granma, the Communist party daily, which has carried letters to the editor for and against reform.

“We have to shake off the stereotype developed over many years that private property is always evil,” González de la Cruz wrote in a recent edition.

“Property, state or private, is valid when it serves a social purpose,” he said.

The opposing view was best expressed in Granma by Guerra González, another correspondent.

“The solution of creating new owners and co-operatives and making current employees into supposed collective owners [in the retail sector] will only lead to uncontrolled free competition and capitalism,” he wrote, adding, “this would represent not only an economic step backward but a political, social and ideological one”.

For the first time since all retail activity – right down to shoe-shine boys – was nationalised in the “revolutionary offensive” of 1968, licences are being handed out to food vendors in the interior who have played cat-and-mouse with police in city streets for decades, saving residents a long walk to state markets.

But that appears to be part of reform already under way in the agriculture sector, where decision-making and food distribution has been decentralised and state lands leased to more than 100,000 farmers and would-be farmers.

Authorities, in an apparent concession to popular frustration, are also granting family farms and co-operatives permission to sell a part of what they produce directly using kiosks and horse and bicycle-drawn carts. But not a single state-run retail outlet has been handed over to employees as a co-operative, let alone privatised.

Os nazistas da Anvisa

Há uma nova resolução, feita pelos funcionários públicos dessa instituição governamental que diz o seguinte: é proibido ao cliente de uma farmacia simplesmente olhar e pegar o remédio que ele quiser.
Ele precisa ir até o balcão, pedir ao farmacêutico e só então obter o que ele quer!

Ufa! Estou salvo!

Afinal, sou um idiota, e como tal não sou capaz se saber o que é bom para mim.Quem sabe o que é bom para mim é o sr. Dirceu Raposo de Melo, ''presidente'' da ANVISA.

http://desdecuba.com/generationy/

Nota do autor: Não costumo copiar e colar conteúdos de outras fontes, mas recomendo enfaticamente a todos os amantes da liberdade o maravilhoso blog ''generation y'' da dissidente cubana Yoani Sanches.
Nao por acaso Yoani é frequentemente perseguida pelo regime, ja tendo recebido varias ameaças de morte.
Ainda assim, ela continua a viver em Havana, esta cidade cheia de belas histórias e oprimida por uma terrível ditadura comunista.Vale a pena ler cada linha do relato dela de hoje:

Generation Y is a Blog inspired by people like me, with names that start with or contain a "Y". Born in Cuba in the '70s and '80s, marked by schools in the countryside, Russian cartoons, illegal emigration and frustration. So I invite, especially, Yanisleidi, Yoandri, Yusimí, Yuniesky and others who carry their "Y's" to read me and to write to me.

“Guardian angels”

I see police everywhere. I don’t know if they are stuck on my retina or if in recent months there has been an alarming growth in their numbers. Then come in Mercedes Benz trucks, stand three at a time on the corners and even show up with their German shepherds at various places in the city. While hundreds of round modern cameras watch us from above, those in uniform control us on the broken sidewalks at street level. They come out of nowhere and disappear when we need them most. Astute in detecting a sack of cement transported without papers, they rarely emerge at night in the slums where the number of crimes grows and grows.

There are also those in plain clothes, those “guardian angels” with a permanent presence in any line, cultural center, or human gathering. They are no longer as easy to spot because they’ve changed their rayon pullovers, checked shirts and military haircuts for costumes ranging from braids with colored beads to letting their underwear show above the waist of their pants. They sport cell phones, sunglasses, and leather sandals, but still seem out of place with the expression of someone who does not blend into the situation they inform about. They go to the Film Festival but have never seen a Fellini film, they are in the art galleries but are incapable of saying whether a painting is figurative or abstract. In short, they have been taught to camouflage themselves but they can’t erase their sneer of contempt toward the “petit bourgeoisie weakness” that is art and its manifestations.

What I fear the most, however, is not this group with the metal badges on their chests, or those under cover who write reports, but the coercive police inside all of us. The one who blows the whistle of fear to warn us of what we do not dare, and who shakes the shackles of indifference each time we add to our critiques or opinions. The one who has attended the Academy of Self-Censorship and is a skilled soldier in showing us the roads that bring no trouble. The one with a Penal Code with at most a couple short articles: No. 1 “Don’t look for problems,” and No. 2 “What you do won’t change anything.” If we wake up one day wanting to silence the pounding of that one’s boots inside our head, then we remember the bars, the courts, the chill of a provincial prison. He doesn’t need to take a cudgel to our ribs, because he knows how to pluck the strings of fear, and with the phrase, “Stay calm, it’s better to wait,” he executes the karate kicks that leave our body immobilized, aching in anticipation.