By: Santiago Romero, MSc.
The economic situation is still tense in the province of Santiago de Cuba and not everything corresponds to the US blockade, when our inefficiencies, lack of control, lack of follow-up, lack of implementation legality and, in the worst cases, lack of courage to demand and not to hesitate in the face of what has been badly done, appear in full light.

At the end of last September, the country’s top leadership was informed of the urgency to comply with the 2024 plan at all costs and how one item could help in this sense, I am referring to the collection of pending fines, because one of our constant problems in economic matters is the accounts receivable and payable.

t was reported an amount of 69.9 million pesos in pending fines. One of the great solutions to move forward would be to collect them, and millions of pesos would be taken away from the deficit.

And we must be aware of this, the damage that is caused when indiscipline is tolerated, such as non-payment, delays, even incomplete execution.

The planned budget deficit for this year alone is more than 6.4 billion pesos, but at the end of September we were able to reduce the deficit by 22 million pesos and we can move forward through the aforementioned variant, however, it cannot be a common practice to reach the accumulation of unpaid or uncollected debts.

One of my great concerns in economic matters is this issue of accounts payable and receivable, a big blemish in our economy –I has traditionally been-, to the point that I previously commented, when we first talked about the formation of the new Cuban economic actors, the possibility that this bad example would take hold, both in the MSMEs and in the Self-Employment. And it happened as I feared.

The “tree that is born crooked never straightens its trunk” is true most of the time. And if this bad behavior is not solved as soon as possible, it will have negative repercussions on the economic contracting, in a weak accounting, danger in the conciliation from the first moment, because it would affect the capital that is available and its deficient agreement; bad accounting of the operations; the non-performance of conciliations; besides the lack of capital to assume the payments in the agreed times and the inadequate use of the gateways and electronic means of payment.

For this reason, it demands the fulfillment of measures such as: strengthening the QR code for payments through electronic channels, “the reconciliation of debts, the allocation of financing to honor the debts of the Budget for subsidy concepts, delimit responsibilities at the different management levels and perfect the control system of accounts receivable and payable”.

It is noteworthy that Betsy Díaz, Minister of Domestic Trade (MINCIN in Spanish), reported in a working session of the National Assembly of People’s Power, as published by Granma in January last year that “overdue accounts payable -with respect to the same period in 2021- grew by 33 %, with chains of unpaid bills from the retailer to the producer or importer, while, through electronic channels, only 533 772 000 pesos were collected, 1.3 % of retail sales; of which 88 million was collected mainly through the use of QR in grocery stores. ” It is not possible that in all scenarios, decades ago, return to the same thing, here in the province Santiago de Cuba: to the need for greater demand in the control of overdue receivables and payables, because if the chains of non-payments grow, the high debts limit the productive cycles and it ends up affecting the purchasing power and, of course, to the economy.