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 Travel & Outdoors | The Cuba Connection | March 2005 
Castro Announces Widespread Distribution of Pressure Cookers in Move to Reassert Control
 Keralanext
Havana - Pressure cookers and rice steamers, essential tools of the Cuban kitchen, are the new weapons in Fidel Castro's latest battle to reassert control over the nation's economy. During a 5 1/2-hour speech broadcast on state TV, Castro said 100,000 pressure cookers would be made available each month - an announcement that underscored the communist country's continued retreat toward greater political and economic centralism.
The move "will do away with the rustic kitchen," Castro told the Federation of Cuban Women on Tuesday night, saying the new cookers would use half the energy of the homemade ones they will replace.
The program could wipe out what has become a popular, and in most cases legal, private business that uses molds to make pressure cookers from cheap aluminum. Although imported cookers are sold in stores for about $25 - more than the average Cuban earns in a month - homemade ones cost about $5.50.
At subsidized prices, the government-distributed cookers will cost about the same as the homemade ones. And the government's cookers can be paid for in monthly installments.
The government began moving last year to trim the already small number of people legally allowed to work for themselves.
Cuba was forced to allow some private business beginning in the mid-1990s amid an economic crisis in the years after the withdrawal of Soviet aid and trade. Those modest reforms were seen as temporary, but necessary, evils.
But after a slow recovery, recent discoveries of oil deposits off Cuba's coast and economic alliances with Venezuela and China, Castro clearly believes the island is strong enough to return to a more centralized economy.
Distribution of the cookers is part of an offensive against "the errors, deviations and confusions" in economic planning of the more recent past, Castro said.
On Tuesday night, the members of the women's government support group gave Castro a standing ovation when he said distribution of the Cuban and imported pressure cookers would start in April.
In the typical Cuban household, the pressure cooker is used everyday to quick-steam black beans or other dried legumes that accompany most lunches and every dinner, along with a huge heap of white rice. They are also used to cook many other traditional Cuban foods such as yucca and sweet potatoes.
Castro said the state would also distribute Chinese-made rice cookers - highly coveted by Cuban women - and perhaps later small electric stoves, all at subsidized prices.
The announcement recalls the first few decades after the triumph of the Cuban revolution when the government was the central point of distribution for all goods - ranging from appliances and furniture to clothing and food.
Now, only a few essential foodstuffs are distributed on the government ration at very low prices: rice, beans, chicken, eggs, coffee, sugar, and a few other things.
Everything else is bought at "el shopping" - the consumer goods stores where prices for imported products are tied to the U.S. dollar, making them exorbitantly high for the average Cuba.
"We hate those types of stores," Castro said Tuesday of what were known as "dollar stores" before Cuba stopped using the American dollar as legal tender and replaced it with its own "convertible peso" last fall.
Indicating those stores also may become a thing of the past, Castro said: "We hated having to do that. It created so many inequalities."
Initially limited to foreigners with American dollars, the stores were opened to Cubans 11 years ago when the government allowed its citizens to use foreign currency.
Cubans quickly got used to shopping at the stores with U.S. dollars for almost all goods except those on the very slim government ration.
But Cuba is now in better economic shape and "beginning to put itself on the map of this chaotic and hopeless world," Castro told the women leaders.
Cuba now can consider raising some government salaries, which Castro said now average about 300 Cuban pesos a month, or about $11. He also said there are plans to build 100,000 new homes this year.
"I am working more than I ever have in my life, and I feel more enthusiastic than ever," he said.
Castro noted some economic weak spots, including the once critical sugar industry. He said this year's harvest is expected to be especially small because of drought in the nation's east. |
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