Cuba plans to create coops in transportation, other services

Cuba plans to create coops in transportation, other services
Published July 09, 2012
EFE

The Cuban government is planning to open up the possibility of creating
cooperatives, up to now only permitted in the agricultural area, in
sectors such as transportation, gastronomy and other services, official
media reported Monday.

The president of the Cooperatives Association, Claudio Alberto Rivera,
said in remarks published in Trabajadores, the weekly magazine of the
CTC, Cuba's only legal union, that in the coming years this form of
activity "will have an important role."

"We want to implement (the cooperatives) in services, gastronomy,
transportation and other areas. The country is (involved) in the
creation of the legal framework to do it, and the experiences in
agriculture have served us as a basis to be in better shape today to
broaden the effort," the economist said.

The government this year approved the policy to create as an experiment
cooperatives outside the agriculture sector as part of the reform plan
that emerged from the April 2011 Cuban Communist Party congress to
"update" the economic model.

Rivera said that currently a group of experts is preparing the
methodology to be used in applying this management model as well as
accounting standards and tax, pricing and employment regulations.

He said that in the Cuban case this includes companies that insert
themselves into the socialist planning model and contribute to the
economic, productive and social development of the town, the community
and the society as a whole.

"The promotion of cooperatives as a type of management constitutes one
of the routes for the process of updating the economic model in the
country, and it signifies a global alternative to the prevailing
neo-liberal system," he said.

In April, upon presenting the approved policy to broaden the use of
cooperatives, Vice President Marino Murillo said that "for each
experiment the basic principles have been designed" that will govern the
functioning of the new cooperatives "preserving in all cases the
regulatory role of the state and the government."

With an eye toward overcoming the crisis Cuba has been experiencing
since the fall of the socialist bloc, President Raul Castro has pushed a
plan of economic adjustments that has opened up a small space for
private initiative, including measures such as broadening the scope for
self-employment. EFE

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