The issue is becoming more and more relevant, since economic dysfunctions are eroding many facets of the lives of citizens, considered the honorary member and coordinator of natural and exact sciences of the Cuban Academy of Sciences.

There are wear and tear, he exemplified, in the standards that “have distinguished our social advantages in the last 60 years, such as quality education, for all, everywhere, universal and free; the right to live healthy and to be cared for and cured without cost or any distinction.”

In the exact sciences 10 thousand is 10 thousand at any time and place in the world; However, “the way in which we compensate work in Cuba today does not follow this principle,” Montero said in his article “The Mathematics of the Economy and Society,” published this Friday by Cubadebate.

An average employee in the business sector can sometimes earn 10 times more than a professional; thus, a doctor can be paying five percent of his salary for a bottle of yogurt on the street and the business worker only 0.5 percent, he exemplified.

Something similar happens to government departments: the budget assigned to a university, he illustrated, can seem very high in pesos, but become insolvent when it must pay certain services to companies with different scales of value of the peso.

This is aggravated in the case of exchanges of value with the outside in any sector of society: for state employees a dollar is worth 24 pesos, but for the same State it becomes almost five times more valuable in pesos when that dollar comes in the form of a legal remittance, he argued.

“Not to mention,” he said, “the value of the informal cash market, which is not paid to the treasury, which can triple the value of remittances and be up to 15 times higher than that of salaries.”

Among the measures announced to address the current difficulties is the solution to the “macroeconomic imbalances”; it can be understood then that this corresponds to the urgent need for the State to truly take the reins of the national economy.

“And this has to happen with a precondition and in the only possible way in today’s world: having a unique and universal exchange value for our money. This can imply temporary devaluations and imbalances,” Montero summarized.

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