Cuban Prime Mininister, Manuel Marrero Cruz.

Havana, December 22 (RHC)- Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz gave an account of his term in office before Parliament on Wednesday.

It has been an intense period of work, learning, and great challenges," he said while speaking at the 8th ordinary period of the National Assembly of People's Power sessions in its 9th Legislature.

This is the first time this exercise has been carried out before the Legislature since the reinstatement of the office on December 21, 2019.

The context was especially complex, with the intensification of the U.S. blockade, the increase of political-ideological subversion, an offensive to discredit the Revolution, and the impact of the world economic crisis, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, said the head of Government.

Marrero Cruz referred to the tasks to confront COVID-19, among them the creation of hospitalization capacities, the expansion of the network of Molecular Biology laboratories, and the search for solutions to the low coverage of medical oxygen, reaching, thanks to the quality and effectiveness of the Cuban protocol, a 99.1 percent recovery rate of those infected.

This places the island among the countries with the highest indicators in the world and the 0.86 percent lethality rate, much lower than the regional and world average, he said.

He added that the national medicine program had been affected, and work is being done to reduce the lack of medicines and the low coverage of essential medicines.

The Prime Minister pointed out that during the period,  the Governor of the province of Sancti Spiritus and the Minister of Construction presented accountability reports before the Council of Ministers. This type of stock-taking will continue in the meetings of that executive body by 2022.

Similarly, temporary working groups have been organized to follow up on tourism and borders, the Ordering Task, the improvement of Wholesale and Retail Trade, the reorganization and promotion of freight forwarding, and customs activities.

As part of Social Communication, we increase the exchange with the population to listen to their concerns, face their problems, and look for solutions. Marrero Cruz emphasized that steps are being taken to create a single legal norm for attention to the population from the Government to maintain a transparent and permanent dialogue between the Government and the citizens.

He said the measures of the most significant impact of the period were the monetary reform, the expansion and improvement of the economic actors, the territorial development policy, the retail and wholesale market in freely convertible currency, and the decentralization in the access to foreign currency by the state and non-state productive systems.

Referring to the Ordering Task, he acknowledged that the difficult situation of the world and the country's economies, in which it was decided to carry out the process, together with problems in the reform's design, and difficulties in its implementation, generated undesired results and multiple dissatisfactions among the population.

In the conclusions of his speech, he remarked that the National Program for Economic and Social Development 2030, the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution, and the Strategy for Social Economic Development of the country, constitute the fundamental tools for the management of the economy and society, and key references for the design and implementation of national and local policies and actions.

He also thanked Raúl Castro, Díaz-Canel, the president of the National Assembly, Esteban Lazo, the Council of Ministers, the deputies, and the people in general, for the trust and support they have placed in him, ratifying his commitment as a  public servant.