Corruption in Cuba - Telephone executives arrested

ETECSA executives arrested, one defected in Panama. 

A new large-scale corruption scandal involving yet another Cuban government ministry, Informatics and Telecommunications, is unfolding in Havana, reported Reuters.

While no statement has been forthcoming from offical Cuban sources, several executives of ETECSA, Cuba’s monopoly telecommunications company, including its President Maimir Mesa, are under arrest, states Havana based journalist Marc Frank on Tuesday.

Reuters further reported:

“Five or six department directors and deputy directors, and maybe a vice president, have been arrested so far and the vice president of logistics, who was in Panama when the investigation began, decided not to return.”

“But the investigation has just begun and many more people might be involved,” the noted the news agency, adding that a retired company vice president was brought to Havana for questioning.

The sources told Reuters that two separate investigations underway, one at ETECSA, involving its booming cellular phone business, and the other into a submarine fiber optic cable financed largely by Venezuela that links Cuba to that country.

The cable reached Cuba in February but has yet to become operative with the online date pushed back from July to September or October. It is unknown whether the corruption case has anything to do with the failure to meet its widely-touted startup date.

The government of Raul Castro has already prosecuted and sentenced dozens of officials and executives for charges and the president says he will continue to come down hard on abuses found.

Soon after succeeding his ailing brother Fidel in 2008, Castro created the Office of the Comptroller General and put the comptroller on the ruling Council of State.

Hundreds of senior Cuban Communist Party officials, state managers and employees have lost their jobs and often their freedom in the shake-up that has followed.

It has included the breaking up of high-level organized graft in the civil aviation, cigar and nickel industries, and at least two ministries and one provincial government.

Sources: Reuters and Havana Times

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Cuba: Tobacco dollars over public health

In a section of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore talks on the topic of smoking and its harmful effects on human life, but this piece of the film seems to be ignored by Fidel Castro and the Cuban communists, although they are apparently anti-global-warming activists.

Much of the civilized world has begun to pass laws to ban smoking in places that affect other people, as recommended by the World Health Organization; however, as if it were not enough to be one of the only countries still governed by a socialist dictatorship, Cuba also prefers to be one of the few nations to avoid anti-tobacco regulations in order to not harm the earnings of its state tobacco industry.

According to WHO, about 6 million people will die this year because of smoking, not including passive smoking, but in the socialist paradise of the Castro brothers, the "problem" to choose between health and dollars is defined in the style of Wall Street investment bankers, what makes more profit?, where tobacco capitalism wins easily.

While Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and other Latin American countries continue to move to offer its citizens smoke-free spaces, Cuba continues to hold the annual "Habano's Festival", tobacco is still among the top three Cuban export products, and the pictures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara with cigars in their mouths are part of Latin American communist culture.

A few years ago, the government of Cuba sought to promote anti-tobacco regulations, but they were nullified with the excuse of being intolerable for the people, which sounds highly implausible because we are talking about one of the most repressive dictatorships on the planet.

And in this we have another of the contradictions of Cuban socialism. Fidel prefers to write about the growth of deserts in Africa and toxic emissions in the northern hemisphere, but where he can do something real for life, in Cuba, where the Castro family has dominated for the past 52 years, he chooses to discuss the problems in foreign countries.

Luis Alberto López Rafaschieri and José Alberto López Rafaschieri

Source: From the Beginning

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Cuba To Promote Foreign Investment

Cuba in future will be a country that promotes foreign investment, expands the private sector and dutifully pays off its debts, according to a proposal revealed on Monday by the ruling Communist party.

But it will not renounce the socialist system installed half a century ago after Fidel Castro took power in a 1959 revolution, according to the 32-page document that will guide debates at a Communist party congress in April.

"The economic policy in the new phase will correspond with the principle that only socialism is capable of overcoming difficulties and preserving the gains of the revolution, and that in the updating of the economic model, planning will be paramount, not the market." - it said.

The document, entitled "Guidelines of Economic and Social Policy," is the program of reforms President Raul Castro will place before the party congress for its consideration.

They could be modified during extensive public discussions ahead of the congress, which was announced by the president on Monday night and will be the first since 1997.

The congress is where Cuba's only legal political party sets direction for the country, supposedly for the next five years, although it will have been 14 years since the last meeting.

The April gathering will be particularly important because, given the age of current leadership, it will be the last for the generation that fought the revolution and has held power since then, hewing hard to communist ideology.

President Castro, 79, took office in 2008 after older brother Fidel Castro, 84, ruled the island for 49 years and finally resigned due to ill health.

He promised to improve the daily lives of Cubans and has focussed on economic improvement, including major reforms announced in September to cut a million government jobs and expand the private sector by granting 250,000 new licenses for self-employment.

ONLY THE ECONOMY
He said Cuba's economy will be the only topic at the congress.

The guidelines include reforms already begun by Raul Castro -- among them the reduction of the state's role in the society and the decentralization of agricultural management.

They include a proposal to eliminate the monthly food ration Cubans receive, symbol of decades of state paternalism and a particular target of Raul Castro, who says handouts have discouraged productivity.

They also call for provisions for bank credits for the new self-employed and wholesale stores to cut their costs, but also for them to pay taxes to finance public spending.

In contrast to past policy, state-owned businesses that do not make money will be completely liquidated.

And the authorities will look to improve the country's international credibility "through the strict fulfilment of contract commitments."

Cuba's standing with the international business community has been damaged the past two years as a cash crunch forced the freezing of Cuban bank accounts held by foreign businesses and of payments to many of them.

The party also proposes "to continue encouraging the participation of foreign capital in Cuba, complementing national investment in those activities of interest to the country."


The document mentions, for example, the development of golf courses, marinas and luxury condominiums to attract wealthier visitors to the Caribbean island.

Raul Castro said that before being distributed, a copy of the guidelines was submitted to Fidel Castro for his consideration. Even though he is no longer president, he is still head of the Communist party.

By Esteban Israel

From: SwissInfo

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No Smoking: Cuba drops cigarettes from ration book

HAVANA - A program that provided state-subsidized smokes to Cuban seniors is headed for the ash heap.

The communist government announced Wednesday it is cutting cigarettes from its monthly ration books effective Sept. 1, the latest in a series of small steps toward fully eliminating subsidies for food and other basic items that impoverished islanders depend on.

Cubans 55 and older had been eligible to receive three packs of "strong" cigarettes and a pack of milds — 80 cigarettes altogether per month — for 6.50 pesos, or the equivalent of about 30 cents, using their ration books at state-run distribution centres.

The island's lowest-quality cigarettes, the only kinds subsidized, normally cost 7 pesos, or about 33 cents, per pack, while imported or topflight domestic brands can go for $3 or more apiece.

Until the 1990s, all Cubans 18 and older received a monthly allotment of cigarettes, but the loss of billions of dollars in annual subsidies from the collapsed Soviet Union forced officials to scale back subsidized smoking. Now even older smokers are out of luck.

"I'm insulted because it's another thing they are taking away from us," said Angela Jimenez, a 64-year-old retiree who lives on a monthly pension of 200 pesos, or about $10.40. Jimenez first took up smoking at 17 but says she will now have to quit because she won't be able to afford them. "I don't know how far they're going to go with this," she said of the subsidy cuts.

The government's announcement made no mention of the health benefits of quitting smoking, saying only that the move was "part of the steps gradually being applied to eliminate subsidies."

Cigarettes are just the latest item to be scrapped from the ration book: Peas and potatoes were dumped in November.

In an additional cost-cutting measure this summer, the government shuttered scores of workplace cafeterias that had fed state employees for virtually nothing, instead giving qualifying Cubans stipends to buy their own food. So far, nearly 250,000 people have seen their government lunches disappear — and officials say further cuts are coming.

Under the existing subsidy system, even nonsmokers accepted cigarette rations, which they then sold on the black market, charging at least 2½ times the subsidized price per pack. Others traded them for rationed items such as salt, sugar, beans, meat, rice, eggs or bread.

Jesus Casanova, a 58-year-old security guard, described the quality of the rationed cigarettes as "awful" — but he collected them every month anyway to feed his elderly neighbour's smoking habit.

"He is a very poor man and he doesn't have the money to smoke anything else," Casanova said. "But now even that's over. I don't know what he's going to do."

Casanova prefers cigars, generally finishing one slender stogie during his 12-hour shift. The island's world-famous cigars were never provided as part of the ration program, however.

Fidel Castro, once the most famous cigar smoker in Cuba — if not the world — famously gave them up under doctors' orders in 1985, and has sporadically urged his fellow islanders to quit.

President Raul Castro's government is trying to cut the weight of subsidies for Cuba's cash-poor economy, a plan that could eventually mean eliminating the entire ration book. A full-page editorial in the Communist Party's Granma newspaper in October suggested the idea, which had long seemed unthinkable.

Critics argue the moves break with what had been a sacred covenant of the Castro brothers' 1959 revolution: that socialism would not make people rich, but would provide all Cubans with at least the basics.

Authorities say their goal is to encourage more productivity and free the state from a crushing economic burden.

Even with the changes, the state still pays for or heavily subsidizes nearly everything including education, health care, housing and transportation. Then again, in a country where almost everyone works for the state, the government only pays salaries of about $20 per month.

The ration program began in 1962 as a temporary way to guarantee basic food for all Cubans in the face of Washington's then-new embargo. It is designed to tide people over, providing a few weeks of food, as well as other occasional staples such as laundry soap and toothpaste.

From: Metro News

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