Wage reform off to slow start in Cuba, report says
* Only 25 percent of companies said to embrace reform
* Workers and managers alike know little about new law
* Raul Castro's reform "still in diapers," magazine says
By Marc Frank
HAVANA, May 11 (Reuters) - More than a year after Cuban President Raul Castro pushed through a wage reform aimed at rewarding productive workers most state-run companies have yet to implement it, the official Bohemia magazine reported.
It was the latest evidence that Castro's efforts to modernize the communist country's economy were being resisted by a state bureaucracy that controls more than 90 percent of economic activity.
The decree promulgated by Castro was supposed to lift wage caps and replace a collective wage system with one based on piecework as a centerpiece of his program to raise Cuba's economic output.
But Bohemia said in its latest issue available this week that a recent labor ministry inspection found that "only 25 percent of the companies inspected used some variant of the piecework system."
A law leasing vacant state lands to anyone willing to till them was also stalled by bureaucracy, Raul himself admitted late last year, though land grants have increased since then. Continued...
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