First Meeting of the Council of Ministers of 2022

Havana, February 1 (RHC)-- Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called on the Council of Ministers, in its first meeting of this year that took place on Monday, to join efforts in immediate tasks that the country will be engaged in the coming weeks, and that will be the focus of the tours to the provinces and the check-up meetings of the Party and the Government.

We have to work more intensely on several tasks, said the Head of State, first of all on measures to improve supplies to the population and contain inflation. Likewise, he said, we must design an integral policy of attention to the non-state sector; and deepen in distance work, teleworking, and non-face-to-face digital procedures, aspects in which we improved during the COVID-19 epidemic, but we have been going backwards.

In the meeting led by Manuel Marrero Cruz, Cuban Prime Minister, Díaz-Canel also specified that progress will continue to be made, under the leadership of the Ministry of Economy and Planning and the Ministry of Finance and Prices, in the new concepts related to the execution of municipal budgets. Among the issues of first attention, he specified, will be the updating of all the social programs of the Revolution, and the rethinking of some concepts of the Housing Policy, "based on the demands of public policies that we have to develop, especially for young people".

The president also mentioned among the urgent needs of the country the design of mechanisms of popular control to address the issue of high prices, inflation, the fight against corruption, and other processes that are showing us that with control and popular participation we can be more effective in combating them.

In a detailed presentation to the highest governing body in Cuba, the President stressed that "the benchmark, what marks the path to follow, is to implement the guidelines, concepts, resolutions, which we approved at the VIII Party Congress. There is the analysis of the problems of our society and the proposals to solve them".

He explained that during the year a set of important political processes will be developed. Now we are going, he reminded, to the popular consultation of the Family Code and then to its Referendum.

This is not the Code of egalitarian marriage, he specified, it is an emancipating Code that solves a whole set of problems that exist at a social level in the country. "It is a Code of plurality, which recognizes all families, all types of families that exist in Cuba, and the problems associated with their development".

To remain in the other approach is to simplify it, said the Head of State, because it has more enriching, more exalting, more emancipating and important aspects than the one almost always referred to, especially by those who want to distort the breadth, comprehensiveness, modernity, strength and contribution to our society of this new Code of Families.

The First Secretary also addressed the role of the Communist Party of Cuba in the defense of the socialist Homeland, in the safeguard of order and tranquility of the citizens and as a superior leading force of the society and the State, which in the current conditions implies an enormous responsibility, it implies defending the essence of Socialism and the concepts that led us to the Congress: unity and continuity.

He described as basic the work with the new generations, treating them, listening to them and giving them participation as the important people they are in our society, with the great growth they have had from the human and revolutionary point of view, in the participation with which they devoted themselves to face the tasks in times of pandemic.

In this regard, Díaz-Canel said that a program for children and youth has been developed, which demands a more cultured, elevated and comprehensive response from all the institutions involved in the education and formation of the new generations. This program, he said, will be aimed at defining public policies for this sector.

He assured that during 2022 the work in the neighborhoods will be strengthened, with the participation of the people, and that they can see that in this participation is the possibility of developing their life projects within our society, to achieve prosperity in the shortest possible time.

Regardless of the progress we made last year in physical actions, to improve infrastructure, to solve accumulated material problems, we must work more on the spiritual, on the emotional.