Díaz-Canel: The socialist state-owned company can indeed be profitable and generate profits

Miguel Díaz-Canel persists in his idea that the socialist state enterprise can and should be profitable, determined to make it the cornerstone of a regime that has experimented for over 60 years with the economic theory of communism, leaving a country in ruins and an elite entrenched in power.

During a visit to the municipality of Amancio Rodríguez in Las Tunas, the Cuban leader showed interest in the performance of the Pedro Plaza Fernández Food Plant, which belongs to the Tecnoazúcar Las Tunas Business Unit (UEB).

In a dialogue with Iraldo Diego Suárez, director of the entity, the also first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) learned that the company "is dedicated to the production and commercialization of safe foods with quality, sausages and other meat derivatives, as well as the processing of fruits and vegetables."

After being informed of new ventures and wonderful results by their managers, Díaz-Canel emphasized that "entities like these that achieve diversification, management, create self-consumption and productive linkages, manage to overcome obstacles and benefit their workers."

One of the objectives of this productive hub is to demonstrate that the socialist state-owned company can indeed achieve positive results, sow large amounts of land to enable high production levels and meet the municipality's food demand, and lower prices," concluded the ruler appointed by General Raúl Castro to succeed him in power.

This was reported by the X account of the Presidency of Cuba, highlighting the phrase that contains three key ideas repeated by the regime's propaganda as a mantra to "correct distortions and revitalize the economy."

Those three ideas are as follows: the centrality of the socialist planned economy and its state-owned enterprises in the Cuban economy, the transfer of responsibility for the population's well-being from the central government to local governments (provincial and municipal), which must now be in charge of "meeting the municipality's food demand," and the urgent need to produce to correct the imbalance between supply and demand, contain inflation, and lower prices.

Regarding the first one, Díaz-Canel himself has taken care of hammering home the need to demonstrate "the success of the state enterprise as a fundamental entity in the economy" time and time again.

While promoting a network of small and medium-sized privately owned businesses under government control, and opening the doors for the gradual and discreet privatization of the state economy through "new actors" and "production linkages," the Cuban ruler emphasizes the importance of the socialist economy for the "social project" of the so-called "revolution," in a way that prevents accusations of handing over national wealth to private hands trusted by the regime.

Regarding the transfer of responsibility for the well-being of Cubans to local entities, the regime's strategy is the same as the one it used to rid itself of the responsibility for the abusive prices and inequality that the existence of MLC stores implied. They emptied them of content to create "new actors" (entrepreneurs) who would assume the responsibility for the supply and prices of essential products that were previously sold by the "State".

Now it is up to the municipalities and their local governments to take on the responsibility for food distribution, which is no longer guaranteed by the central government and its rationing policies. With the gradual phasing out of the ration book, the feeding of Cubans becomes the responsibility of what the local governments can do about it.

The same happens with prices. If they remain high in relation to the battered purchasing power of Cubans, it is not the responsibility of the central government and its "economic and monetary policies", but of the capacity of local entities to produce food and essential goods in order to meet demand and lower prices.

While national wealth is transferred into private hands without public bidding, with arbitrary exclusion of economic actors, without transparency, and not even supervision by the comptroller over the owners of 70% of the country's dollarized economy; while the regime's top leaders wash their hands of the scarcity of food, high prices, and inflation, and decide to "eliminate excessive gratuities and undue subsidies," undermining the "social contract" represented by the ration book, Dr. Díaz-Canel travels the entire Island in the midst of its worst energy crisis to extol the virtues of a presumed socialist economy on the brink of extinction, according to the Russian mafia paradigm for the creation of a new oligarchic, corrupt, elitist, and irreplaceable power.