By Pascal Fletcher - The Financial Times Limited. 21 Mar 2000 01:43GMT
Trying to teach capitalist management techniques in one of the world's few remaining diehard Communist states, whose president regularly reviles neo-liberal economics and demonises institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, may appear at first sight as useful as trying to plough the
sea.
But the challenge has not discouraged a group of European business school professors who are teaching a business management course in Cuba, in a programme funded by the European Commission. It is the third time the EC-financed course is being taught on the socialist-ruled Caribbean island.
Far from experiencing suspicion and resistance, the teachers have encountered enthusiastic pupils and apparently willing co-operation from the Cuban authorities, who are already seeking to repeat the programme for a fourth year.
"The hunger for knowledge is incredible, it is amazing," says Francisco Lamolla, the European director of the programme and a professor from Esade in Barcelona, which is among several leading European business schools taking part in the Cuba programme.
Other European centres supplying teachers include the London School of Economics, Hec (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris), Universidad Nova de Lisboa and UPM (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). The 12-week diploma course spread over a year is known as Deade - the acronym of
the Spanish for European Diploma in Administration and Company Management - and is being taught this year at two Cuban universities.
The 1999-2000 Deade programme is being held for the first time in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second city, in addition to the capi tal Havana, where close to 200 students took the course in the academic years 1995-96 and 1997-98.
Prof Lamolla makes no secret of the fact that Europe's intention in backing the Deade programme is to support and encourage economic reform in Cuba, whose Communist leadership has pledged to remain faithful to socialist economics, including the concept of central planning and predominant state
ownership.
"The idea is to change the mentality . . . Deade obliges them to re-think strategy," Prof Lamolla says. For this reason, the courses, which include classes in economics, accounting, business strategies and marketing, are aimed not at inexperienced university students but at career
professionals. These include up and coming executives from Cuban state companies and foreign investment ventures in Cuba, and government technocrats.
"We are looking at directors and professionals, the kind of people who have an important impact now and who will do so in the longer term, people who have economic power," Prof Lamolla says.
For example, the 44 pupils at this year's pioneering course in Santiago de Cuba, taught at the Universidad de Oriente, include directors of state sugar mills, a local government official and a Cuban executive of a hotel run by Spain's Sol Meliá hotel chain.
In Havana, where the course is run at the José Antonio Echevarría University, this year's class is split between 40 directors, executives and technocrats, including employees of Cuba's ruling Council of State headed by Fidel Castro, and about 20 business education professors.
The Deade course represents an intriguing opening to western-style capitalist management concepts and techniques in a country where neo-liberal economic policies and capitalist financial institutions are regularly pilloried in public by government leaders from Mr Castro downwards.
The veteran 73-year-old Cuban president, who has completed four decades in power since his 1959 Revolution, opened up the island's state-run economy to foreign business and tourism only in the last decade, to counter the effects of a severe economic recession triggered by the collapse of the
Soviet bloc. He has made clear several times since then that he introduced these and other cautious, liberalising reforms out of necessity, not conviction.
In a typical trademark speech in January, Mr Castro described the IMF as an "executioner" of developing world nations and denounced the existing capitalist global economic system as "unsustainable". "The world is a colossal madness and chaos reigns," he said. Cuba
would seek to pursue its own socialist course.
It may seem surprising that the Deade programme, which Prof Lamolla says is unashamedly capitalist in its criteria, has not been construed as "counter-revolutionary" by the Cuban authorities. But Prof Lamolla says he and the other professors are careful to keep what they teach separate
from Cuba's own economic reality. Pupils receive courses on Cuba's economy and policies from Cuban teachers.
"We make it clear. We say: 'We are not telling you how to run Cuban companies. We are coming to tell you how we run companies in Europe'," Prof Lamolla says.
But he notes that some of the modern management objectives being taught in the Deade course appear to dovetail with a current government campaign for business improvement, to modernise and reform Cuban state companies to make them more efficient. Government officials say this reform programme is
a priority.
"For socialism to be successful, it is essential for socialist state companies to be efficient," Cuban vice-president Carlos Lage wrote in aletter to Cuban company directors in January.
"Today more than ever, I am convinced that a socialist state company can be more efficient than the best capitalist one," he added.
Prof Lamolla says he has noticed that his students have appeared particularly interested in applying what they have learnt in the Deade programme to the government's efficiency drive in the state economic sector. "They are taking it seriously."
However, Mr Castro, Mr Lage and other government leaders take every opportunity to stress that Cuba's limited economic liberalisation and cautious reforms are not intended to return the island to capitalism but to "perfect" one-party socialism.
Privatisation remains a dirty word and Cubans are not allowed to own or run full-blown legal private businesses, apart from limited private economic activities such as running a home restaurant or renting one's house. These, and tightly regulated self-employed trades and services, constitute
Cuba's tiny legal private sector at present, although there is a booming illegal private sector.
There are signs the Deade programme may be encouraging budding entrepreneurs. The course includes a section on "setting up a company" and Prof Lamolla says several of the practical projects presented by the students have included proposals for paladares, as the private home restaurants
are called.
For the time being, however, the programme must accept contemporary reality. The "setting up a company" section is being modified to "creating new business" to reflect the current situation in Cuba where the economy remains predominantly in state hands.
But Prof Lamolla says he is encouraged by the results of a poll conducted on a group of past pupils.
Asked to specify how much of what they had learnt they had been able to apply in their current company jobs, those polled said nearly 50 per cent. When asked how much of Deade they thought could be usefully applied to Cuban companies, the answer was a resounding 80 per cent.
A glimpse into the future, perhaps?
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