Cuba’s Farm Bureaucracy Once Again Sabotages Production
HAVANA TIMES – A few weeks ago we published a post referring to the bad work of the Ministry of Agriculture and the rest of the institutions that work in this sector, unable to guarantee more than 20% of the food of the Cubans.
This week we are publishing another saying that they have decided to force peasants to pay taxes, both owners and beneficial owners. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano said that a bureaucrat is the one who for every solution is able to find a problem.
Instead of encouraging production the agrarian bureaucracy puts up obstacles. While other countries subsidize their farm production, here more taxes are applied.
In Cuba, the farmers are not paid on time from the government buyers; there harvests are allowed to rot in the fields when those buyers don’t show up; the government doesn’t sell them enough inputs; and now, besides that, they want to squeeze more money from them.
Every measure that a Cuban institution takes should have to be valued in the face of the great objectives of the nation and no resolution that contradicts them should be approved. Can anyone believe that this tax favors more harvests and reduced imports?
Land zoned for agricultural use is taxable in California. Albeit less than commercial or residential, it is nonetheless taxable. Cuban farmers pay no taxes on the land they cultivate. Largely because until recently they did not own the land, the Castros did.
Fernando as always with irrefutable aspects of the part of the reality of the island. While no one questions that most of the social indicators have shown surprising resilience, given the size of the economic clash it faced, and facing the country from the Special Period, it is also unquestionable that bureaucracy and corruption devour the aspirations of the Cuban people and do not allow it to take off. In U.S.A. farmers regardless of not paying taxes are subsidized by the state. Imagine the extent to which the landowners, in deciding what their final use will be, maintains four cows in the same land, whereby the land is considered taxable as agricultural, that is to say, it does not pay taxes.