The president of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez ratified the vocation of creative and emancipatory resistance of the Cuban people against the aggressiveness of US imperialism. He expressed this in the conclusions of the second government visit to this province of eastern Cuba for a couple of days.
Las Tunas, Cuba.- “The best response to the new kind of colonization attempts, to the threats, to the interference and sanctions that the Empire tries to impose on us, will be to ratify the legacy that is very clear in our history and that will always be an answer of resistance and struggle.
In the end, with that resistance, we achieved goals that are always emancipatory,” he said in the presence of his ministerial cabinet, the main political and governmental authorities of the territory, as well as a broad representation of local business and political and social organizations.
CONTINUITY RESULTS
Díaz-Canel highlighted what he described as “results of continuity”, appreciated in the Government's visit related to the first one carried out in February 2019.
“There is a level of response that confirms the usefulness of this work system,” he said. However, he clarified: "We don't come here to control." "We come as a central government to share with you the problems we have, to learn from what is done in the territories so that everything that is done well serves us to socialize it at the country level."
The purpose, he insisted, is "to help you unlock from the central government the things that can contribute to the territory." "I think that working relationship between central government-territorial governments, which we have built and perfected, is already beginning to give a group of results," he said.
In Las Tunas, these advances were reflected, he commented, in the elimination of the non-payment chain, in the steps towards the computerization of the Physical Planning procedures and in which the drought confrontation was managed more efficiently.
In addition, he illustrated, last February to date, it was possible to recover the production of pork meat on the ground. In this regard, he stated that the resuscitation he saw in El Bleo the Basic Business Unit must be an example to avoid the deterioration of an infrastructure created to produce large quantities of food. "Everything that Fidel conceived for the development of the country had a foundation, a study and was based on deep thought," he said.
The Cuban President said that during the past 11 months after the first trip of the Council of Ministers for Las Tunas´ geography, the amount of cassava-sown land grew.
The resuscitation in two years of the feed mill was included in the investment plan and the presence of the Francisco Cabrera Metal Structures Company in the Mariel Special Development Zone increased. Although, he pointed out, Metunas need support to have sufficient raw material for the remainder of 2020, bypassing the pitfalls that now prevent it from accessing the freely convertible currency resulting from its sales to companies settled in the most attractive to foreign investors.
He commended the fulfillment of the local plan for housing construction last year and considered regarding supplies of high demand products such as chicken and oil: “from here we understood that there was a different distribution between east and west and from there they were taken a group of measures to improve it”.
He also commended that the water treatment plant of the Jesús Menéndez municipality is already a foreseen investment of the plan. The progress in the water pipelines of the municipalities of Majibacoa and Puerto Padre. Besides, he praised that the students of the Electrical Engineering career, instead of being at the Moa Metallurgical Mining Institute, be located at Camagüey University, much closer to the province.
DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS TO REITERATED PROBLEMS
The Vice President of the Republic, Salvador Valdés Mesa, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz, and several Deputy Prime Ministers attended the meeting including numerous officials of various ministerial portfolios.
There, the Cuban President reiterated the four priorities that mark his management: the economy, the confrontation with the colonizing platform that from the cultural point of view wants to impose neoliberal and globalized capitalism; the defense of the country; and the intense legislative exercise that occurs after the proclamation of the new Constitution in April 2019.
The political leader specified what should be the work that addresses Las Tunas in 2020. In the field of economics, he said, compliance with exportable funds and retail merchandise circulation. In other areas in which we should deal more immediately here will be the investments of the “Jesús Menéndez” water treatment plant, the bypass of the provincial capital. Likewise, the conversion into a Maternal and Child Hospital of today Mártires de Las Tunas Pediatric Hospital; the solution of water supply to rural communities that receive it by cars or tank trains; and advance the project to build an incinerator linked to the necrology services.
Díaz-Canel said that the Balcony of Eastern Cuba, regarding job creation, has a low unemployment rate but the percentage of unemployed people who are not looking for work is high. He said that similar emphasis would require the development of the Melanio Ortiz productive pole in the municipality of Jobabo, investments in the feed mill, the grain beneficiary, and those linked to municipal food self-supply.
Referring to the sugar harvest, he expressed his confidence that the homeland of Major General Vicente García consumes his plan despite the delays. To do this, he suggested that the current ground levels must be raised and the problems that affect them, which undergo disorganization, lack of skilled labor force and others of a technical nature, be mitigated.
He said that the Cuban government is thinking about a redesign of the current ways of harvesting because the financial expenses repeated in all the mills are already unsustainable without taking into account their real conditions to grind efficiently. "We are going to study in each territory the availability of cane that we need to produce, what is the size of the harvest that we can do and how we are going to do it," he anticipated.
"It makes no sense that a factory like that to stop," he said, describing the shortcomings of the Israel Santos Company (Duralmet) with a reputation earned in the manufacture of metalwork modules for the Cuban housing program. Hence, he indicated doing the best to avoid it.
The president of the Republic had words of approval for the advances in the existing innovation projects at the University of Las Tunas. Meanwhile, he urged to continue expanding exportable funds in aquaculture, to take better advantage of the capabilities of the food industry and to follow closely the indicators of the Maternal and Child Program (PAMI) as last year the mortality of newborns of less than one year old increased a little. The same, he said, should be done to achieve the completion of nursing staff and the resuscitation of the Carlos Leyva School of Sports Initiation (EIDE).
VOICE OF THE CITIZENSHIP
Díaz-Canel dedicated part of his speech to echoing the dissatisfactions they heard on this visit by the local population. Among these ones, he listed prices and collection system for agricultural productions; attention to agricultural workers and peasants; resellers of agricultural or industrial products; and the quality of bread. “I no longer know if we are discussing the quality of bread or something we call bread but that it is not. We have to finish solving that,” he said.
The inhabitants of Las Tunas, said the president, rightly criticize the state of the roads, the prices of private transport, the hygiene and quality of health services and the problems of medical ethics.
He finally enumerated popular objections to matters related to water supply, septic tanks, and garbage collection; the absence of wholesale markets; poor customer service; the diversion of materials for housing construction, together with bureaucracy in the procedures of the institutions of the Institute of Physical Planning; and certain corruption in the entities of the housing system.
To face this situation, we must look for actions that mitigate these dissatisfactions, he concluded.
