Budgetary finance system (Cuba)
예산 재정 체계
The method of managing state enterprises worked out from 1960 by the Cuban Ministry of Industries under Che Guevara. Plants with a similar technical base or a common destination for their output were grouped into consolidated enterprises whose plan and management were controlled directly by central bodies. Enterprises had no funds of their own and received no bank credit, their receipts went straight to the state budget, and money served only as a unit of account reflecting their operations in prices. It stood against the Soviet-style economic calculation system (khozraschet), which gave enterprises financial self-management and material incentives, and was one pole of the Cuban Great Debate of 1963–1965.
In depth
The system
In "On the Budgetary Finance System" (February 1964) Guevara wrote that the system had its official sanction in the Law Regulating the Budgetary Finance System of State Enterprises, grew out of internal work in the Ministry of Industries, and had begun to take shape around 1960. The most immediate difference between the systems was the idea of the enterprise: under the budgetary system it was a conglomerate of plants, under economic calculation a production unit with its own legal personality. A budgetary enterprise drew money from the bank according to the plan, from a general expenses account and a special wages account, but any deposit passed to the state automatically; enterprises in the other socialist countries held their own funds at the bank and drew credit on which they paid interest.
Incentives and consciousness
Guevara named financial self-management and the attitude to material incentives as the fundamental differences. He did not deny the objective necessity of material incentives, he said, but was reluctant to use them as the fundamental lever: they came from capitalism and were destined to die under socialism, and direct material incentives and consciousness were contradictory. He also rejected the Soviet Manual of Political Economy's claim that the law of value could be used consciously in planning.
The debate and after
The foreign trade minister Alberto Mora, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, head of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), and the French economist Charles Bettelheim took the side of economic calculation; Ernest Mandel sided with Guevara against Bettelheim. A separate dispute on the role of banking ran with the National Bank president Marcelo Fernández Font. In 1987 Rodríguez granted that Che's system had been more progressive and egalitarian, but held that economic calculation had suited Cuban conditions better.