Cuba is set to scrap more than 500,000 jobs in its large government sector by the first quarter of next year, with a view to increasing productivity and easing pressure on the treasury, the island's single trade union said Monday. The state "cannot and must not continue to keep up" companies with "inflated staff bodies," which "are a burden on the economy, are counter-productive, generate bad habits and deform workers' conduct," dpa quoted the Cuban Workers' Central (CTC) as saying. "It is necessary to increase production and service quality, to reduce the large social spending and to eliminate inappropriate gratuities, excessive subsidies, study as a source of employment and early retirement," the CTC statement published in the weekly Trabajadores said. Cuban President Raul Castro told Parliament on August 1 that state-sector payrolls would be reduced. The state sector accounts for 95 per cent of economic activity in communist Cuba. As an alternative, Castro said, the state would seek to promote private- sector work, allowing Cubans to launch small businesses. The Cuban economy is in a severe crisis, a consequence of the global financial crisis, the decades-old US embargo on the island and the devastation caused by hurricanes in 2008, but also of low productivity in many of its state companies. The government has launched a slow process of reform, although it insists that it will not give up socialism. Even historic Cuban leader Fidel Castro said in an interview that was published last week in the US magazine The Atlantic that the Cuban model is in trouble. "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he told US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. Later, Castro backtracked. While he admitted to having said what Goldberg quoted him as saying, he argued that his comment had been misinterpreted. "My idea, as everyone knows, is that the capitalist system no longer works either for the United States or for the world, which it leads from crisis to crisis, every time more serious, global and repeated, from which one cannot escape," Castro said in Havana.
