MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Over 300.000 Cubans have opted to work in the private sector as ‘self-employed’

Almost 22% have chosen activities linked to food businesses

The number of Cubans working in the private sector continues to rise and now includes over 300,000 as a result of President Raul Castro government’s economic reforms that have been implemented since last October.

Granma, the government newspaper said Saturday that the Labour and Social Security Ministry reported that up to April 30 some 309,728 people were “self-employed,” and of those, 221,839 (71%) obtained their licenses after the expansion approved of private sector activities.

Until October 2010, when private employment was opened for 178 economic sectors, only 157,000 self-employment permits had been awarded.

According to Granma of the new licenses granted, 22% are for “making and selling food” in a variety of establishments, from restaurants to small cafeterias to stalls for selling eats in the streets, for which a total of 49,349 permits have been awarded.

Among the more sought-after licenses are those for “transportation and carrying passengers” (13,982) and for the so-called “producers and sellers of household items” (10,187). Another popular request is for hired labourer with 38,704 permits, a field that “ought to continue growing” in line with the government’s new measures, the daily said.

This month the Cuban government announced that it will continue “making self-employment more flexible” and will authorize the hiring of workers in all activities of the non-state sector, which up to now is allowed in only 83 of the 178 private fields.

The newspaper also said that 68% of the new licenses “granted and being processed” are for people who were previously out of work, while 16% of the applicants were retired or state employees.

Approximately 30% of the new permits have been granted in the city of Havana, which makes it the province with the highest number of licenses awarded.

The extension of private employment is one of the chief measures of President Raul Castro’s plan of reforms to overcome the nation’s economic stagnation and low productivity and was ratified in April at the 6th Congress of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba, PCC, the country’s only legal political party.

The drive to self-employment is also one of the options proposed by the authorities to mitigate the effects of the drastic cutback in state workforces – 500,000 workers are expected to be left redundant this year, though this has been postponed because the nascent private sector “is not yet capable of absorbing that many people”.

The Cuban regime reforms’ policy to make the economy more efficient and productive has plans to eliminate a million government jobs out of the current 4.2 million. The private sector and farming is expected to absorb the redundancies.

Small farms and cooperatives have bee allowed to market their produce directly and will begin buying their inputs from private suppliers in an effort to further increase food production. The energy and food bill are the most expensive and foreign currency drains for Cuba.