CUBAN GOVERNMENT'S POSITION IN ECONOMIC DISCUSSION
A debate has been going on in Cuba over economic issues that has had "international repercussions," Saverio Tutino reports from, Havana in an article which appeared in the May 28 issue of Unita, the daily newspaper of the Italian Communist party.
Tutino notes that economists from other countries have participated in the discussion, including a polemic between Charles Bettelheim and Ernest Mandel, the editor of the Belgian weekly La Gauche,
“Tt now appears that the political leadership has made a decision in the dispute, at least provisionally,” Tutino writes. “Ina speech May 8, Dorticdés took a line that seemed to hold that each side was partly right and partly wrong at the same time. In reality a choice was made that appears to be both realistic and theoretically correct. ‘'We are very pleased,'! the president said, 'that it is the factor of morale that stimulates the efforts of the Ministry of Industry to the maximum. We know that it has been adopted by the Ministry and we applaud this doctrine, Our present and our future hinge fundamentally on our ideology and our revolutionary morale. This does not deny the cardinal principles that must regulate the return for labor in a socialist society; namely, to each according to his labor. In our opinion this principle is completely compatible and consistent with the principle that underlines the importance of the moral stimulants. To harmonize and synthesize these two factors, while maintaining the engagement to reinforce each day the importance and the involvement of the moral stimulants must be one of the objectives of our economic work,'!"
Tutino added that "Ernesto Guevara, the Minister of Industry, was not present. After returning from his long trip to Africa and Asia at the end of March, Guevara has not appeared in public, His Ministry is being directed in the interim by Comrade Guzman, Perhaps reassignments in the leadership are in preparation,"
MPLA