Greetings from numerous delegations have also been heard. Carlos Lage, secretary of the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers, took up questions that have been discussed informally by many delegates concerning the economic measures taken in the l990s to confront the economic crisis. He pointed to gains made in the six years since the 1994 conference. Unemployment dropped last year from 8 percent to 6 percent. Productivity and job conditions have improved, with production nationwide growing an average of 4.4 percent a year since l995.
Food supplies are more ample and nutrition is noticeably better.
Instead of extended, daily interruptions in electric power, such blackouts are now only infrequent. Foreign capital has been used to improve the productivity of some important Cuban export industries such as nickel. But this and other measures, such as setting up farmers markets and legalizing the private holding of dollars, Lage explained, are not aimed at restoring some kind of capitalism. Ours is not and never has been a privatization process. We are not trying to establish a market economy, and we will never subordinate our revolution to the market.