Havana/The need to increase the workforce on the Island, affected by mass emigration and disenchantment with state jobs, has led the Granma government to hand over land in usufruct to 300 boys recently released from mandatory military service. Another 96, who are not yet on sick leave, have signed up to receive land when the Armed Forces “demobilize” them.
The official press It was not clear whether benefits were offered to the imminent farmers, but it is certain that it is not about greater freedoms when it comes to working their lands. Spread across the 13 municipalities of the province, the boys have already affiliated the 2,269 hectares granted in total to different institutions: “52 to agricultural companies, another 54 in basic cooperative production units, 142 in credit and service cooperatives and 18 to agricultural production cooperatives,” he listed. The Demajaguawhich defended that this “link” to the State gives the guajiros “the possibility of accessing bank loans, contracting and marketing their productions and acquiring inputs.”
The lands given also have a predetermined purpose. The crops are, the media indicated, coffee and tobacco, products normally dedicated to export and earning foreign currency, in addition to sugarcane – a crop in critical debacle – and large and small livestock, also missing from national markets.
Finally he said The Demajagua132 young people from a “June job placement” plan will also join the initiative, those who go to the municipal registries, who are being offered the delivery of available lands. According to the media, a similar measure began in 2011 to put young people who had recently graduated from the service to work and Granma was the first province to carry out this process.
Spread across the 13 municipalities of the province, the boys have already affiliated the 2,269 hectares granted in total to different institutions
The regime’s allergy to “lazy people” and “outcasts,” as it has come to call the unemployed, is something that the leaders have not been able to get rid of in more than six decades. Now, with the lack of labor force, getting young people to work for the State is equivalent to solving both issues at once.
“Overcoming is a weapon against unemployment once again, in this territory, in which 2,203 people, until a week ago separated from study and work, have returned to the classrooms,” he celebrated. Granma this Wednesday referring to Guantanamo.
Although some seek to graduate from high school and others to enter university, the majority are going to “train as technicians in dissimilar specialties – 32 in total – which constitute a priority and necessity in the Upper East,” said the Communist Party outlet.
“From such efforts, Health in Guantánamo will be born nurses and anesthetists, new trainwomen will be born for transportation, as will inspectors in the electrical branch, and linemen who will reinforce the work of Etecsa,” added the media, which did not hide that the main objective is to “inject labor force into strategic sectors in which Guantánamo is experiencing a deficit.”
In this case, those involved were not entirely free to choose the areas in which they will work. The province, which visited the unemployed “house to house,” made a list of options that respond to the specific needs of the territory. “The courses, also open to those who chose to enter the Ministry of the Interior, involve the University of Guantánamo, in the training of graduates in Accounting and Finance, in Development Management, as well as in Law, in Primary Education and in Preschool Education,” he said.
While looking for the workforce it needs, the State has begun, for the umpteenth time, to fill vacancies with university students
While looking for the labor force it needs, the State has begun, for the umpteenth time, to fill places with university students non-graduates. On Monday, at the University of Medical Sciences in Havana, students were called to form a contingent to work as teachers due to the shortage of teachers in schools. “We have more than a thousand students involved in this work in several provinces, although we hope that the number will increase in the territories where there are the greatest complexities,” he told Rebel Youth the Minister of Education, Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto.
The plan is for university students to fill the vacant places in secondary and pre-university schools throughout the Island. To do this, the minister said, it is necessary to “achieve the stimulus and increase the interest of young people who already participate, as well as eliminate certain bureaucratic obstacles that make it difficult to hire new interested parties.”
The same guys from Medical Sciences are also the ones who, year after year, are sent to carry out vector inspections in neighborhoods throughout the Island.
A occupation survey published last July by the National Office of Statistics and Information insisted that the Island has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the region (1.7%). However, the report’s own numbers reflected a different reality: more than half of Cubans over 15 years of age do not work or are not looking for work.
Of the 8,433,226 Cubans aged 15 or older in 2024, 4,227,333 people were not part of the labor force, compared to 4,205,893 who were (50.1% compared to 49.9%), and of the latter, 69,333 are unemployed. This represents an employment rate of just 49%, one of the lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean, whose average last year was 58.9%, according to the International Labor Organization.
