"Private property" in the constitution

Before and since the proposed new Cuban constitution (pdf) was released, there has been lots of talk about how it “could permit owning private property,” as a Washington Post editorial put it.

Sure enough, it deals with private property – but not exactly in that new-dawn-of-private-property way, which wouldn’t make sense because it is already permissible for Cubans to own private property, as we use the term. The vast majority of Cuban homes are owned outright with property titles and since 2011, residential properties are bought and sold on the open market. Many but not all individual farmers own their land and homes outright. Cars are owned and traded. Personal effects, of course, are privately owned.

What the new constitution does is to enumerate different kinds of property – and among these, to draw a distinction between personal property and private property. (See paragraphs 93 and 94 in the text linked above.)

The distinction is immaterial to a capitalist but significant to Marxists, and it goes like this: “personal property” refers to personal effects that have no economic purpose, while “private property” is defined as private ownership of means of production.

Hence a socialist constitution that stresses the state’s predominant economic role will also enshrine this concept of property, and with it the private sector’s role in the economy.

A narrow way to view this is that the constitution is catching up with reality, because private entities, both individuals and cooperatives in farming and other sectors, already own their means of production.

Another way to view it is as a more solid legal foundation for future legislation governing the private sector, such as the pending laws on enterprises and cooperatives.

If, that is, the Cuban government decides to take advantage of it when it comes time to write those laws.

Odds and ends

• Granma published the text of the foreign investment law today.

• In the Mariel economic zone, as in foreign investment projects in general, workers are hired and paid through an employment agency.  Payment is made in hard currency, the agency keeps most of the money and pays the workers a normal Cuban wage.  Foreign businesses then make side payments to the workers to raise their wages and productivity, which is why jobs with foreign businesses are sought-after.  Trabajadores reports that in the Mariel economic zone, the agency will no longer have a “revenue-collecting” function and will pay workers 80 percent of the wage negotiated between the foreign business and the agency.

• Reuters on Cuba’s new private non-farm cooperatives; more than 450 are now operating in the program’s “experimental” phase.

• Granma: the new labor code makes Good Friday a holiday in Cuba, this week and permanently.

• A granddaughter recounts an interview that her grandfather Clark Hewitt Galloway conducted with Fidel Castro in 1959.

• Dodger phenom Yasiel Puig’s flight from Cuba was harrowing, and still is so, recounted in detail by Los Angeles Magazine in English and Spanish.

Malmierca on the new investment law

The text of Cuba’s newly approved foreign investment law will come out in due course, and according to this presentation by trade and investment minister Rodrigo Malmierca, the new policy will also be defined by regulations and norms to be issued by at least four parts of the Cuban government.

The first principle he stated regarding the new policy is that foreign investment is viewed now “as a source of development for the country in the short, medium, and long term.”  That may seem obvious, but it’s a change from the old, more narrow formulation of foreign investment as a “complement” to Cuban production.  Everything else flows from that, beginning with the broader list of specific goals that foreign capital is to serve – instead of “capital, markets, and technology,” it now includes job generation, acquisition of new management methods, and more.  In two years, if a substantial number of new investment projects are operating in Cuba, that change of thinking will be responsible.

Other points of note:

If you’re curious as to whether the priority on renewable energy means that the taboo on cane-based ethanol has been cast aside, there’s not a clear answer.  He refers to the use of “biomass, which includes that of sugar cane” but it’s not clear whether he means cane itself or bagasse, the waste product of sugar milling.

He notes that cooperatives will be able to participate in foreign investment projects but with the participation of a state enterprise; details here.

Contracting of employees will continue to occur through state employment agencies, with salaries negotiated between the foreign partner and the agency.

He, like others, refers to “errors” of past policies on investment but doesn’t say what they were. 

Sugar and agriculture, two high-potential sectors where Cuba has shown low interest in foreign participation in the past, are on the list of priorities where sector-specific policies have been defined.