.c The Associated Press
MEXICO CITY (AP) - A senior Communist Party official on Wednesday signaled a sharp limit to Cuba's experiment with private business, comparing domestic capitalists to "piranhas.''
The hard-line article by Raul Valdes Vivo, published in the party daily Granma, seems a clear signal that Cuba will not follow communist China in allowing domestic private investment.
Valdes Vivo, director of the party's ideology school and a member of the party's Central Committee, warned that letting Cubans invest in businesses "would introduce a social force that sooner or later would serve the counterrevolution'' against President Fidel Castro's government.
In what seemed a playful allusion to Castro's nickname, "The Horse,'' Valdes Vivo described local investors as "piranhas ... capable in a minimum time of devouring a horse down to the bones.''
Cuba permitted more than 100 types of self-employment in the early 1990s to create jobs and services for a socialist economy crippled by the loss of Soviet aid and trade in 1991.
It also stepped up efforts to attract foreign investment in joint ventures with the Cuban government, as well as legalizing the use of U.S. dollars by Cubans. Those changes helped put the brakes on the country's economic slide.
Several Cuban and foreign economists have urged the government to go even further by letting Cuban citizens put their savings in private businesses or investment funds.
But over the past year, Cuba has imposed greater taxes and restrictions on self-employment occupations such as repair shops, bicycle parking lots, snack bars and restaurants, cutting the number of licensed personal or family businesses to about 170,000 from over 200,000.
The article dismayed some foreign economists who have long studied the Cuban economy.
"I don't see how this can be good for Cuba,'' said Archibald Ritter of Carleton University in Toronto, Canada. "They can't both welcome foreign investment, and expect it to come, and make incredibly heated ideological attacks on private ownership in general.''
Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College in Massachusetts said Valdes Vivo's argument that small-scale private investment "can't contribute to growth, doesn't contribute to capital, doesn't contribute to markets is just flat out wrong.''
He said last year's passage of a tighter U.S. embargo made the Cubans "more paranoid about opening markets up... They are retrenching more.''
"It's a picture of reassertion of ancient dogma,'' he added.
AP-NY-11-26-97 1853EST