2024-02-16 09:02:09
The appointment of the late Rodrigo Malmierca, former Minister of Foreign Trade, as Cuban ambassador to Canada and the update of the legislative schedule for 2024 are some of the more than 30 agreements approved “unanimously” in the Cuban Parliament in recent weeks and published this Monday at Official Gazette.
Malmierca, about whom the official press has remained silent since his replacement in April 2023 by Ricardo Cabrisas, will occupy the Ottawa office of Héctor Igarza – who will be “transferred from mission” – as extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador. The measure seems aimed at strengthening economic ties with the North American country, the main source of tourists to Cuba, with the sending of a regime leader.
The Parliament document, signed on each of its pages by its president, Esteban Lazo, begins – after a declaration of adhesion to Palestine and against Israel – with the approval of the economic plan for 2024, designed by the recently dismissed Minister of Economy Alejandro Gil. The deputy prime minister, according to the text, had to report to the deputies at the end of January, but he left office days after the scheduled date for that meeting, about which there is no information.
The legislative roadmap of the regime in recent months – and its numerous ups and downs – is evident in the text, which calls for “the highest supervision” of work in several sections.
The regime’s legislative roadmap in recent months – and its numerous ups and downs – is evident in the text, which demands in several sections “the highest supervision” of the work of various ministries.
One of the most alarming cases, due to its level of disorganization, is the Agriculture portfolio. For her, the Assembly instructs to employ as soon as possible the cadres who were made to study the Managers of the Future diploma, and whose objective is the express training of leaders for the fields of the Island.
To resolve the agricultural debacle and the lack of inputs – which producers have been denouncing for years – Parliament proposes to the Government “the creation of a wholesale market for inputs, raw materials, medicines, tools and technologies for producers, using financial sources as foreign exchange earnings generated by exports”. The priority: tobacco, whose management Parliament considers exemplary and demands that its “experiences” be applied to other products.
Crime in the countryside continues to be a worrying reality and has made obsolete, they admit, the current General Directives to Prevent and Confront Crime, Illegalities, Corruption and Social Indiscipline. Parliament asks to “redesign” its strategy against cattle theft and slaughter, which has multiplied throughout the country.
The deputies do not plan to take any concrete measures, but they recommend “interesting the agencies of the Central State Administration”
Special attention is paid to three provinces: Las Tunas, Cienfuegos and Villa Clara, whose governors appeared in Parliament last year putting on the table the failures in the execution of their plans and the numbers in the red. In the case of the first, its own leader declared it “ungovernable” last December due to the inflation suffered by its businesses and administrative corruption.
The deputies do not plan to take any concrete measures, but they recommend “interesting the agencies of the Central State Administration” so that “in what corresponds to them, they pay differentiated attention to Las Tunas on complex accumulated problems that cause dissatisfaction among the population.”
As for Cienfuegos and Villa Clara, with similar difficulties, the Assembly requests plans to improve the harvest – in the case of the first -, which has been in decline for years, and to address, in the second, the deficiencies in construction, commerce and “social prevention.”
The legislative schedule for 2024 includes an Immigration Law and others on Citizenship and Migration, under the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior. Economy will propose the Business, Science, Technology and Environment Law on Transparency and Access to Information.
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