09 December 2024

The Central Committee of Cuba’s Communist Party (PCC) has said that it will convene on 12 and 13 December in plenary, to  analyse “vital issues of the Cuban economy and society, in the midst of the complex scenario that the country faces.”

The announcement followed a meeting of Cuba’s Council of Ministers during which participants suggested that the country’s macro-economic reform process is only advancing slowly and that it will take more time to relaunch the Cuban economy

The December 5 announcement by the PCC noted that compliance with the Government’s projections to correct distortions and boost the economy, the draft Economic Plan and Budget for 2025, attention to state and non-state economic actors, and actions to address deviations and negative trends in current Cuban society will be the focus of attention. 

It ended with the line “The meeting will confirm the Party’s leading role in ensuring and leading the country’s main programmes and priorities.”

Cuba’s National Assembly is due to meet shortly afterwards, from16 to 18 December. Full coverage of the Communist Party’s plenary and the National Assembly meeting will appear in our next issue.

Official reporting of Cuba’s Council of Ministers meeting, again laid stress on the need to continue with efforts to address the country’s budget deficit if the island is to achieve economic growth through the delivery of the reforms agreed in December 2023 (Details Cuba Briefing 2 January 2024).

A report on the Presidency website indicated that at their 2 December meeting, senior Ministers laid stress on “continuing to seek and exploit the reserves that still exist in the territories, to increase as much as possible income to the municipal budget and reduce unnecessary expenses.”

Presenting details of progress made up to the end of October, the Minister of Finance and Prices, Vladimir Regueiro Ale, told colleagues that the budget deficit stood at CUP29.72bn or 20% of the deficit planned for 2024 and 39.6% of what had been expected at that date.

Highlights in this issue: 

• Aviation fuel shortage resolved, averting potential crisis for tourism
• Coming sugar campaign expected to be particularly challenging
• New resolution ends private sector’s role in wholesale trade
• Cuba stresses importance of continuing co-operation with US on migration issues
• Díaz-Canel  thanks China’s visiting Public Security Minister for cybersecurity support

The report provided no detail as to the extent to which the ten-month outcome had resulted from cutting public expenditure or through increasing revenues. However, most analysts believe that it is a significant reduction in expenditure and austerity that has played the most significant role, causing new hardship for most Cubans. Notwithstanding, Ale noted that the result confirmed that “the reduction of the fiscal deficit has had a sustained behaviour throughout the year,” and that at the end of October the current account showed a positive balance of CUP19bn.

Without citing any figures, the meeting report indicated that budgetary adjustments, reductions in expenditure, and  increases in income, had enabled better results to be achieved in areas “that have a positive impact on the reduction of the fiscal deficit.”

Addressing fellow Ministers about the pace of progress, Joaquín Alonso, the Minister of Economy and Planning, was noticeably more downbeat, reportedly detailing several indicators whose results, “confirm the complexities that the country is currently facing” in relation to imports of goods, foreign currency earnings from exports, power distribution, and freight and passenger transportation.

“Despite this reality, the truth is that there are still signs of an ordering of macroeconomic issues,” Alonso was reported to have said, before suggesting  to Ministers that the process was only “gradually advancing towards the expected result.” 

In doing so, he said only that there was a “tendency towards a decrease in inflation, both monthly and year-on-year, as well as the reduction of the fiscal deficit, the behaviour of the current account, and the indicators of monetary circulation.” 

Alonso added that while measures to control inflation through inspections and price caps were achieving a reduction in prices and were a positive sign in the macroeconomic reordering process, this was “still insufficient.”

Also speaking, the First Deputy Minister of Economy and Planning, Mildrey Granadillo de la Torre, was quoted as repeating comments she had made at a recent meeting of the Council of State (Cuba Briefing 25 November 2024), saying that: “We are beginning a decisive stage to take stock of what has been achieved and also of what remains to be done” before deciding on the next steps “to correct distortions and relaunch the economy.”

In her remarks she said that during  October the emphasis had been on the development of a schedule to regulate financial flows and access to foreign currency, the monitoring and control of the banking process, implementing maximum prices for the sale of the six products in high demand by the population, and on taking forward actions aimed at “advancing the principle of subsidising people and not products.”

More generally, the Council of Ministers meeting addressed a range of domestic issues from agriculture, the coming sugar campaign, to productivity, the regulation of religious bodies and friendly societies, and several pressing social issues.

The meeting was notable for the second reference in a week to the issue of nuclear power generation. The official report indicated that one of three draft Legislative Decrees to be sent by ministers to the Council of State for approval related to the use of nuclear energy. 

In this respect the official report noted: “it was explained that [the proposed law] establishes the pillars and principles that govern the use of nuclear energy in the country, while reinforcing the peaceful nature of its use and of ionizing radiation in Cuba, through an explicit provision that prohibits the proliferation of nuclear weapons, thereby responding to international commitments assumed by the Cuban State.”

As Cuba Briefing reported last week,  among the issues discussed recently in Vienna between Deputy Prime Minister, Eduardo Martínez, and Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was  “the organisation’s work platform related to the study and evaluation of the use of small modular reactors for electricity generation.”

09 December 2024, Issue 1260

 The Caribbean Council is able to provide further detail about all of the stories in Cuba Briefing. If you would like a more detailed insight into any of the content of today’s issue, please get in touch.

Cuba Briefing is now taking its annual Christmas and New Year’s break. The next edition will be published on 6 January 2025.