HAVANA, Cuba. – Not long ago the Minister of the Food Industry, Alberto López, appeared on the television program Round Tablein which he advocated for MSMEs to import goods and inputs to supply them to state-owned companies. In this way, according to the official, these entities could use all the installed capacities and thus comply with their production plans.
In other words, what is stipulated in the Resolution 56in the sense that MSMEs will only be able to enter wholesale trade if they do so with state entities, is a measure that has been in the works for some time. Once again, the Castro regime must resort to administrative mechanisms, to the detriment of economic strategies, to achieve its purposes.
The official discourse argues that everyone will win in this type of wholesale activity, since non-state actors will benefit from the experience of government marketers, and operations will be carried out with lower costs, which could result in a decrease in prices.
However, it is evident that the measure aims to prevent the economic progress of MSMEs, and for these businesses to escape government control. It is as if the machinery of power wanted to gradually nationalize these non-state actors. It was even talked about in the IX Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Party to incorporate the management of MSMEs into the national economy plan. All in the context of the vaunted chaining of state forms with non-state forms, when in reality it is about the chains that the State imposes on non-state forms to keep them tied.
The present and future panorama of MSMEs becomes gloomy from every point of view. Those that continue to do retail trade will continue to face pressure from the authorities. Price caps, forced sales of products, excessive fines, elimination of any type of tax exemption, and the protection of the brand new National Institute of Non-State Economic Actors, headed by Mercedes López Acea, a declared enemy of market relations, and destroyer of several supply-demand agromarkets when she served as head of the Communist Party in the capital.
For MSMEs that opt for wholesale trade with the State, among other obstacles, the specter of non-payments arises. Government entities are characterized by not paying adequately—or simply not paying—those private producers who sell them productions. This happens, for example, with farmers who sell their livestock and crops to state collection companies, and then do not receive the corresponding payments in quantity or time.
Let us then imagine the damages that an MSME will face that sells to the State and then does not receive the payments that allow it to continue with its production or import cycle.
There is consensus about the lack of motivation – and also the uncertainty – that overwhelms the owners of non-state MSMEs in the face of so much harassment by the Government. It is very difficult to work with desires and invest money without knowing what tomorrow will bring. The closure of some MSMEs has already been reported, and high-demand products such as chicken, sausages and powdered milk are beginning to become scarce on the shelves of these forms of economic management.
The State, for its part, offers fewer options every day to feed the population, which has almost the only alternative to what is offered by MSMEs and other non-state actors. For this reason, ordinary Cubans view with pessimism the actions of inspectors and other authorities against MSMEs, and wonder what will happen if the Government achieves the total suffocation of these private businesses.
