Cuba economy czar: Reforms entering critical phase

Communist-led Cuba’s experiment with limited capitalism is entering a crucial and transformative phase this year with the decentralization of bloated state-run businesses, the island’s economic czar said Tuesday.

Marino Murillo said the goal is to improve efficiency of those businesses and let the successful ones keep more of their profits.

Murillo said the next 18 months will be the “most complex” part of President Raul Castro’s reform program, which has already seen limited openings to private entrepreneurship and a relaxation of many social restrictions.

“The first stage of the reforms has so far, fundamentally, been the elimination of prohibitions in society,” Murillo said in just his second face-to-face encounter with foreign journalists since he rose to prominence three years ago.

“During what remains of the year this year and next year, we will work on ... the most profound transformations,” he added.

Castro’s economic and social reforms, which began in 2010, aim to resuscitate a flagging economy with a smattering of free-market principles, though officials insist that a wholesale embrace of capitalism is not planned.

After five decades of a state-dominated economy, hundreds of thousands of people have legally gone into business for themselves, private farmers are cultivating land with the government’s blessing and dozens of independent nonagricultural cooperatives were launched recently under a pilot program.