Cuba bets on domestic production to achieve economic sovereignty

President Miguel Díaz-Canel explained that Cuba is working hard to stimulate national production in order to achieve economic sovereignty and meet the the country's domestic needs.

In an interview with French-Spanish journalist and writer Ignacio Ramonet, published in Granma newspaper, the president assured that Cuba can produce an important part of the food it needs and importing fewer products.

“Today we need to have more than two billion dollars to import food, which, even if you invest them, you do not always import the same amount or more; on the contrary, you import less because prices rise and freight costs increase,” the Cuban president noted.

Díaz-Canel said that the stimulation of national production, especially agriculture, is a process that is being promoted at the local level, based on the potential of each municipality to be self-sufficient.

During the interview, the president reviewed the challenges faced by the state-owned companies, which must be guaranteed the same conditions under which the non-state sector works. He acknowledged that the state-owned enterprise today has a group of powers, which are not always well used.

He also referred to the use of science and innovation in a country like Cuba, a country with few natural resources, but which, nevertheless, possesses very talented human capital.

For this reason, he stressed, Cuba is committed to a Government Management System based on Science and Innovation to be applied in all areas such as agriculture, industry and food production.

The dignitary assured that “each of the measures we are going to apply must have a treatment so that vulnerable people and families in vulnerable situations are not affected, because our purpose is not to create more inequalities”.

He explained that the country designed a Macroeconomic Stabilization Program that will be developed until 2030 and that “we will have to be constantly adjusting it in order to achieve the macroeconomic balances that the country needs in the shortest possible time”.

He explained that the program covers monetary policy, fiscal policy, incentives for national production, exports, and also addresses the problems of inflation, the exchange market, among other aspects associated with the allocation of resources, the role of state-owned companies, and their relationship with the rest of the economic actors.