• Submitted by: manso
• Politics and Government
• 08 / 02 / 2011

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By Craig Mauro in Americas.On Mon, 08/01/2011 - 12:48.Many will be watching Cuba’s National Assembly meeting on Monday closely to see if the one-party legislature gives final approval to a set of potentially transformative economic changes. 

This past April, in its first congress in 14 years, the country’s Communist Party proposed several new laws that the legislative body is now considering.

Among the changes on agenda is allowing Cubans to buy and sell real estate for the first time in more than 50 years of communism.

There are also measures under consideration that would allow for a significant expansion of the number of small-scale businesses like barber shops and cafes, as well as giving more autonomy to the larger, state-owned enterprises that dominate the economy.

The assembly’s stamp of approval would be the last one needed from a government institution for these laws to take effect.

Cubans by now are familiar with the new ideas that were discussed in April. What everyone here is waiting for now are the details about how the ideas become reality.

The several hundred assembly members had split into several committees that were said to be hammering out those specifics on Thursday and Friday.

Our only information about those sessions comes from state-run media, which say broad progress is being made but have given few concrete details.

With the the economy struggling to recover from the global recession and three major hurricanes in 2008, Cuba’s communist government has been flirting with free-market policies over the past couple of years.

Government officials say change is coming, but it will be gradual and at a pace meant to preserve the centrally planned socialist economic model that has been in place here for more than five decades.

At the important 26th of July celebrations last week marking the annual National Rebellion Day, Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado said the government is moving "without hurry but without pause" on reviving the economy.

Both Machado, in that speech, and the state-run media, later in the week, publicly criticised different aspects of the Cuban economic planning process and the progress so far in making the economy more efficient - or, as the leaders here put it, "perfecting the socialist model".

There are high expectations that many more details will come out of Monday’s assembly meeting.

But as many Cuba watchers will tell you, it can be foolish to try to predict what will happen here and when.

So far, the foreign media have not been given a programme for the meeting, so we just have to wait and see if on Monday Cubans will get some of the news that many of them have long been anticipating.

Source: Aljazeera.net (blog)