Cuba Beware: Cooperatives Are Too Efficient

By Fernando Ravsberg

HAVANA TIMES — Cuban lawmakers who have inspected non-agricultural cooperatives in dozens of different regions in Cuba, have claimed, in Parliament, that these “increase their contribution to economic and social sectors of the utmost importance; they contribute to improving its members’ quality of life and they manage to satisfy clients’ demands, especially in the construction sector.”

However, these same lawmakers warn that these cooperatives “could reduce human capital at state-owned companies, as there is a growing exodus of trained personnel who move to cooperatives.” This legislature’s message will work against the cooperatives with their great sin being the fact that they are an attractive job position and they satisfy their clients’ demands.

However, it isn’t the only sin: “a significant group of cooperatives perform their functions and makes deals outside of the region where they are based, which limits the public administration’s competent bodies’ control and inspection of them.”

That is to say those cooperative members leave their home communities to resolve economic and social problems and this causes problems with the bureaucracy’s control, which now must leave their air-conditioned offices in order to inspect them. It’s a hard knock life for a Cuban bureaucrat.

With these warnings coming from lawmakers, the legalization of cooperatives will move forward at the pace of a tied-down turtle. I suspect they will put every possible monkey wrench on them to try and make state-owned companies catch up to them, even though this will just be artificial progress and at the expense of lower productivity and efficiency.