From our Bureau of Socialist Social Justice with some assistance from our Bureau of Socialist Voodoo Economics
One of the many reasons that Castro, Inc. has basically given up on agriculture is that at some point it woke up to the fact that growing food is far less profitable than importing it.
According to a recent study, Castro, Inc. not only imports most of the food consumed in Cuba, but marks up the prices by as much as 240 percent. This includes all the chicken and other food items bought from the U.S.
Loosely translated from Diario de Cuba
The Cuban Government, far from solving the national food problems, has as its “priority to profit from the needs of the population.” For this reason, it does not require increasing production but rather importing food products that it subsequently sells in the retail networks under its control at more than 240% of its value, denounced the Cuba Siglo 21 ideas laboratory.
This is how dossier number 13 entitled “GAESA prefers to import meat than produce it” is presented, prepared by economist Emilio Morales, president of Havana Consulting Group and vice president of Cuba Siglo 21.
In the text, Morales points out that when in 2010 the Cuban Government announced a reform process for the transformation of the economy, one of the fundamental objectives was to stimulate national agricultural production to reduce the import of food, whose value at that time exceeded annually 2,000 million dollars and represented 80% of the total food consumed in the country.
However, the figures demonstrate the failure of the measures 12 years later, according to Morales’ study. “The result is that in 2022 the country had to import 90.2% of the chicken consumed. The monetary value of these imports increased by 131.20%, going from 291.06 million dollars invested in 2010 to 672.96 million dollars invested in 2022,” he points out.
According to Morales, the entry of MSMEs into the Island’s economy has not influenced an increase in production in Cuban agriculture either. The new MSMEs created are mostly focused on the import of products and the resale of these within the domestic market, not on domestic agricultural production, he recalls.
“MSMEs are not going to solve food production, nor is GAESA interested in solving it because its privileged monopolistic position is based on the import and circulation of goods, not on the basis of production.
And needless to say, the money to pay for the 240% charged by the regime has to be real money, meaning it has to come from outside Cuba. Yep, that’s right, cue the “diaspora.”