The Cuban government has announced plans to lay off at least half a million state workers by the middle of 2011 and to reduce restrictions on private enterprise to help them find new jobs, in one of the most dramatic steps yet to reform communist island’s economy.
Raul Castro, the Cuban president who replaced his ailing brother Fidel, suggested in a nationally televised speech on Monday that nearly one million Cuban workers, about one in five, may be redundant.
The lay-offs will start immediately.
Al Jazeera’s Juan Jacomino, reporting from Havana said: “It will take a few days before Cubans realise what is going to hit them.”
“They are going to have to get used to working in a sector other than the state. For many years, 90 percent of the Cuban labour force has been working for the state,” he said.
The Cuban Workers Confederation (CTC), the only labour union allowed by the government, said the state would increase private-sector job opportunities, including allowing more Cubans to become self-employed and encouraging cooperatives run by employees rather than government administrators.
“Our state neither can nor should continue maintaining companies … with inflated payrolls, and losses that are a drag on the economy, are counterproductive, generate bad habits and deform worker’s performance,” the CTC said published in government media.
Our correspondent said that Cuba will continue to provide its citizens with free health-care and education: social programmes which are widely seen as hallmarks of the 1959 revolution. (Caribbean News Now)
