Havana, Cuba: A few days before the VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), the Island today is promoting its economic reorganization, a process whose genesis responds to the change in mentality that the sixth conclave of that political organization defended, Prensa Latina publishes.
In this sense, 10 years ago the party meeting drew up the Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy, the base document of the Ordering Task that has been applied in Cuba since January 1.
According to the Granma newspaper, the official organ of the PCC, before approving this strategy, more than eight million militants and citizens debated the project and made the pertinent changes.
At the VI Congress, 986 delegates reformulated and approved 311 guidelines that would mark the updating of the island’s economic model to date.
Cuba had not held a partisan appointment for 14 years so it had to face problems in the international environment, debt maturities, the economic upsurge of the United States blockade and the continuity of the political process after the illness of the historical leader Fidel Castro.
In fact, the VI Congress also transcended the election of the Army General, Raúl Castro, as the first secretary of the political organization.
In his central report during the meeting, the then president of the Councils of State and Ministers urged to boost the economy and mentioned the main concerns facing the nation after the 2000s.
According to the Cuban Press Information Center, ‘since 2005 the limitations of the economy to face the deficit of the financial account of the balance of payments, the bank withholding of transfers abroad and the high amount of the maturities of the debt’.
The document adds that between 1997 and 2010, Cuba experienced the intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the United States with total losses estimated at more than 751 billion dollars.
The 2011 Economic and Social Policy Guidelines project emphasizes that the internal order was influenced by “factors such as low efficiency, decapitalization of the productive base and infrastructure, aging and stagnation in population growth”.
Against this background, the top leadership of the Party and the Government urged a change in the way of thinking that would allow reorienting some policies approved in the previous conclave.
“In order to decentralize and change mentality, it is an obligatory requirement to develop the regulatory framework that clearly defines the powers and functions of each link,” Raúl Castro pointed out in the VI Congress.
The objective is “to untie the knots that grip the development of the productive forces”, he added.
The guidelines were analyzed again in the party meeting of 2016 and since then they have been updated depending on the socioeconomic situation facing the largest of the Antilles.