At the end of December -and at the beginning of January- the 168 Municipal Assemblies of the People’s Power will meet to approve, once the items have been disaggregated, the Budget for 2024 and to project the budget deficit.

They will then have as a guide or reference the debates and agreements of the Second Ordinary Period of Sessions of the Parliament, and the speeches at its closing and at the VII Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Party delivered by its First Secretary and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez.

As Manuel Marrero Cruz, Prime Minister, oriented before the National Assembly of People’s Power when announcing the Government’s Projections to correct distortions and boost the economy during the year 2024, each municipality must additionally approve an action plan.

This must be aimed at increasing income and reducing expenses in administrative activities and others that do not impact the population.

It is necessary to identify all reserves for the capture of new sources of income and to advance in the reduction of State Budget expenditures, said Marrero Cruz in the Second Ordinary Session of the National Assembly of People’s Power.

As Vladimir Regueiro Ale, Minister of Finance and Prices, explained to the Cuban News Agency, for the second consecutive year it is the municipal assemblies that approve their budget proposals, and we have verified that in a general sense the conditions for such an important step have been created.

This used to be the responsibility of the Administration Councils, so now we achieve greater representation of the population when in the discussions the delegates transmit the concerns and priority criteria in the attention to certain problems that exist in each popular council and circumscription.

In the opinion of the head of Finance and Prices in a very complex economic scenario, in which the international context foresees a discreet growth of two percent by 2024, even under these conditions, efforts are made to ensure levels of activity that give sustainability to sectors such as health, education, culture and sports.

Therefore, he added, we are facing a budget with extraordinary characteristics, which ratifies the humanist vocation of the Revolution to prioritize such services, which reach our population free of charge, without forgetting that it assumes a risk of increasing the deficit level, one of the issues of greatest concern and on which the institutional parliamentary debate was focused.

In his statements to the ACN Regueiro Ale stressed as priorities at the local level to boost the production of goods and services and achieve optimal discipline in the payment of taxes.

He also emphasized that in the municipal budget proposals, the destinations of programs at that level, such as those related to subsidies for construction materials, the transformation of neighborhoods, and attention to mothers with three or more children under 17 years of age, should be broken down».