Cuba’s National Assembly will set up a powerful new agency on Saturday tasked with fighting corruption, which President Raul Castro has called a “deadly cancer” plaguing the communist-ruled island’s economy. Official information on corruption in Cuba is sparse but, in 2000, Attorney General Juan Escalona, testifying before a parliamentary committee, reported that his office began the prosecutions of 5,800 white-collar criminal cases.
Foreign businessmen report that corruption at the very highest level of government is rare. But kickbacks are relatively common among state-run company managers and even more so at government offices where Cubans go to take care of housing and other problems.
Russia and Cuba have been working to revitalise relations, which cooled after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In that connection, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin signed four contracts securing exploration rights in Cuba’s economic zone in the Gulf. Russia has also granted a loan of $150 million to buy construction and agricultural equipment.
Cash-strapped Cuba should consider putting more of its state-run economy in the hands of producers, as President Raul Castro has done with agriculture, the country’s top economic commentator said on Tuesday. “In the Cuban economy, there’s a need to look for formulas more dynamic, more intelligent, of understanding property, of running a business, of running a cafeteria,” he said.
About 90 percent of communist-led Cuba’s economy is under state control.
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