State-Owned Enterprises Can Be Profitable, Insists Díaz-Canel

Miguel Díaz-Canel continues to assert that state-owned socialist enterprises can and should be profitable, determined to make them the cornerstone of a regime that has experimented with communist economic theory for over 60 years, leaving a country in ruins and an elite entrenched in power.

During his visit to the Amancio Rodríguez municipality in Las Tunas, the Cuban leader showed interest in the performance of the Pedro Plaza Fernández Food Plant, part of the Tecnoazúcar Las Tunas Basic Business Unit (UEB). In a conversation with Iraldo Diego Suárez, the plant's director, Díaz-Canel, who is also the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), learned that the company "is dedicated to the production and commercialization of safe and quality foods, sausages, and other meat derivatives, as well as the processing of fruits and vegetables."

After being briefed on new initiatives and remarkable results by those in charge, Díaz-Canel highlighted that "entities like these, which achieve diversification, management, self-consumption, and productive linkages, manage to overcome obstacles and benefit their workers."

"Among the objectives of this productive hub is to demonstrate that the state-owned socialist enterprise can achieve positive results, cultivate large volumes of land to allow high productions, meet the food demand of the municipality, and lower prices," concluded the leader appointed by General Raúl Castro to succeed him in power.

The Cuban Presidency's Twitter account echoed this, emphasizing the message containing three key ideas frequently repeated by regime propaganda to "correct distortions and boost the economy." These three ideas are the following: the centrality of the planned socialist economy and its state enterprises in the Cuban economy, the shift of responsibility for the population's well-being from the central government to local governments (provincial and municipal), which are now tasked with "meeting the municipality's food demand," and the urgent need to produce to correct the imbalance between supply and demand, contain inflation, and lower prices.

Shift in Responsibility and Economic Reforms

On the first point, Díaz-Canel himself has repeatedly emphasized the need to demonstrate "the success of the state-owned enterprise as a fundamental entity of the economy."

While promoting a network of small and medium-sized private enterprises (SMEs) under government control and opening the door to the progressive and subtle privatization of the state economy through "new actors" and "productive linkages," the Cuban leader underscores the importance of the socialist economy for the "social project" of the so-called "revolution," ensuring he cannot be accused of handing over national wealth to private entities trusted by the regime.

Regarding the shift of responsibility for Cubans' well-being to local entities, the regime's strategy mirrors the approach used to shed responsibility for exorbitant prices and inequality associated with the existence of MLC stores. These stores were gradually emptied of content to create "new actors" (entrepreneurs) who would take on the responsibility for the supply and prices of essential products previously sold by the "State."

Now, municipalities and their local governments are tasked with ensuring food distribution, which the central government and its rationing policies no longer guarantee. With the slow phasing out of the ration book, the responsibility for feeding Cubans now falls on what local governments can accomplish.

The same applies to prices. If they remain high relative to Cubans' meager purchasing power, it is not the central government's responsibility and its "economic and monetary policies," but rather the capacity of local entities to produce food and essential goods to meet demand and lower prices.

While national wealth transitions to private hands without public bidding, with arbitrary exclusion of economic actors, lacking transparency and even oversight from the comptroller over the owners of 70% of the country's dollarized economy; while the regime's elite washes its hands of food shortages, high prices, and inflation, and decides to "eliminate excessive gratuities and undue subsidies," dismantling the "social contract" represented by the ration book, Dr. Díaz-Canel tours the entire island amid its worst energy crisis to preach the virtues of a supposed socialist economy on the brink of extinction, following the Russian mafioso paradigm for creating a new oligarchic, corrupt, elitist, and irreplaceable power.