• Submitted by: manso
• Business and Economy
• 12 / 29 / 2010

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Published December 28, 2010.EFE.Havana. Cubans without formal employment in recent weeks have snapped up more than 60 percent of the new licenses issued for self-employment, Communist Party daily Granma said Tuesday.

The newspaper said that "thousands of Cubans" have applied for documents to go into business for themselves, a type of employment embodied in the new reforms with which the Raul Castro government aims to "modernize" the socialist model.

Since the process began in October of awarding the new licenses for non-state work, the applicants have been "predominantly people without formal employment, in more than 60 percent of the cases," Granma said, citing figures of the Labor and Social Security Ministry, or MTSS.

The paper also said that among the 178 private-sector activities available, the preferred options are food preparation and sales, buying and selling discs, and the making and selling of household articles.

Granma said Tuesday that as the new reforms get rolling, the authorities should "untie the knots of bureaucracy that are holding up the prompt issuing of licenses to self-employed workers."

It said that the MTSS is working so as "not to transplant" to the licensing process "the bureaucratic practices that have characterized other procedures required of the people."

The Cuban government estimates that in 2011 some 146,000 public-sector jobs will be definitively eliminated, and some 351,000 public servants will enter other types of independent employment, as required by the application of economic adjustments.

Of those 351,000 people, at least 100,000 will have to become self-employed.

At the beginning of this month, official media said that some 45,000 new licenses for non-state employment had already been authorized and were being processed.

The government has proposed self-employment as an alternative for the roughly 500,000 state employees facing layoffs as part of an austerity package.

Though the government has made it clear that on the island socialist planning and not the market will rule, the planned adjustments increase the scope of private enterprise and Raul Castro himself has asked that the expansion of self-employment not be "stigmatized."

Source: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2010/12/28/