The stunning figure was revealed by Cuban leader Raúl Castro himself: The Cuban government and its enterprises might have more than one million excess workers on their payrolls.
That’s more than one million unproductive workers, out of what official Cuban figures show is a total of 4.9 million people working in formal jobs in a country of 11.2 million people.
And that’s part of the explanation, several economists said, for a calamitously over-centralized and unproductive economy that, for example, forces a tropical island to import an estimated 60 percent of the food its people consume. The Cuban government has historically insisted on keeping people officially employed, even in unproductive jobs. Unemployment was last reported at 1.6 percent by the National Statistics Office (ONE).
Full story: Raúl Castro admits that island has one million excess jobs – Cuba – MiamiHerald.com