Food Plant Reopens in Santiago de Cuba
HAVANA TIMES, Oct. 12 – Nine years after having stopped operations, the pasta and candy plant in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba reinitiated its productions as part of a state program to reactivate food processing industries, reported IPS.
The factory produces candies, bonbons, cookies, mixture for pastas, pizzas and instant beverages, and chocolate-covered sponge fingers.
Cuba is attempting to recover its food production and industries to lessen its dependency on imports that it can not afford.
Alberto N Jones, Thank you so much for your comments. This is precisely the kind of public airing that can lead to meaningful reform of Cuban socialism. I hope the pages of HT will be a continuing conduit for this kind of healthy expression.
This needs to be said: The present leaders of Cuba will easily go into joint-ventures with foreign capitalists–nickel, tourism, etc.–and call this sort of collaboration “real” socialism. At the same time, it does not occur to them to go into joint ventures with Cuban workers and managers in cooperative industrial and commercial enterprises!
The way out of Cuba’s dismal economic performance is for employees of enterprise to own their concerns cooperatively. Responsibility for efficient, market-satisfying production would then go mainly to workers. The socialist state would hold “preferred” stock ownership–non-controlling–in lieu of taxes.
“Joint ventures with Cuban citizens, not foreign capitalists” might be a slogan.
Reopening this factory is not a victory, it is an indictment on those myoptic leaders, who choose the easy path of importing rather than producing. Selling caramels, cookies and hundredes of other staples imported from Uruguay, Argentina, Pakistan or China, should suffice to remove and hold accountable these so called managers. Galleticas Sire, Chorizos el Mino, detergente Ace in Havana, laundry soap 13-13, Sammy Ice Cream or Caramelos Tudela in Guantanamo, Quinabeer Soda, Choco Milk in Santiago de Cuba, Pound Cake and Gazeniga from Camaguey just to mention a few, were all far better of of higher quality to these imported and sold at three or four times its value to white-wash and cover their ineptitude. The same happens in the car rental, lodging and food sales in the hospitality industry, leading tens of thousands of European tourists, to skip Cuba to neighboring countries, with far less atractions, human development, in exchange for a better service, diverse amenities for LESS!