Cuba's economy. Blog # 16

The stunning figure was revealed by Cuban leader Raúl Castro himself: The Cuban government and its enterprises might have more than one million excess workers on their payrolls.

That’s more than one million unproductive workers, out of what official Cuban figures show is a total of 4.9 million people working in formal jobs in a country of 11.2 million people.

And that’s part of the explanation, several economists said, for a calamitously over-centralized and unproductive economy that, for example, forces a tropical island to import an estimated 60 percent of the food its people consume. The Cuban government has historically insisted on keeping people officially employed, even in unproductive jobs. Unemployment was last reported at 1.6 percent by the National Statistics Office (ONE).

About 95 percent of the jobs in Cuba's formal sector are with the government -- ministries, their agencies and enterprises -- though salaries are so low, averaging about $20 a month, nationwide, that many Cubans also have off-the-books work to make ends meet.

But the figures on excess jobs in the government and its enterprises mentioned by Raúl Castro surprised even some Cuban economists.

``We know there's an excess of hundreds of thousands of workers in the budgeted and enterprise sectors (and) some analysts calculate that the excess of jobs is more than one million,'' he said Sunday in a speech to the Cuban Communist Youth.
There are ``inflated payrolls, very inflated payrolls, terribly inflated payrolls,'' Castro said before adding a reassurance: ``The revolution will not forsake anyone. I will fight to create the conditions so that all Cubans have honorable jobs.''

It was not the first time that Cuban officials have publicly acknowledged the government has far too many employees.
The commerce and restaurant sectors alone in Cienfuegos, Cuba's smallest province, have 1,400 too many employees, according to a recent report in the newspaper Trabajadores, run by the government-controlled Cuban Confederation of Workers (CTC),
The province's education sector also is overstaffed by 1,025, and the sports sector by 500, the newspaper added, quoting Marlén Jiménez, a provincial official of the CTC.

This is something that i find completely uneccesary , but the government has always had topo many employees and they have always said that they need them. This is something that Cuban government does not look at or pays attention to because they feel like the government employees are never too much. Many changes are needed in the Cuban government as well as the economy because if not then their economy will never rise the way they want the economy to rise. Many changes need to be made including these that they were talking about. Fidel Castro made sure that there was always many employees in the government so that the country would aklways be in charge and well positioned like he always had it. Maybe his brother will make some better changes so that the country could change to a better position, more freedom, ands a better economy. Thank you for readiong this blog.