Cuba fires minister who said beggars were all fakes

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HAVANA (Reuters) -The Cuban government fired its labor minister after she was publicly rebuked by the president for saying the country’s beggars were all phonies in disguise.

A brief announcement Tuesday evening said Labor and Social Security Minister Marta Elena Feito had demonstrated a lack of “objectivity and sensitivity on topics that are currently central to political and governmental policy”.

The minister’s remarks on live television on Monday were widely circulated on social media and became a lightning rod for popular frustration with years of economic crisis.

“We have seen people who appear to be beggars, but when you look at their hands, when you look at the clothes those people wear, they are disguised as beggars … In Cuba, there are no beggars,” Feito said.

“They have found an easy way of life, to make money and not to work as is appropriate.”

President Miguel Diaz-Canel addressed the comments in his own appearance before the committee the next day, saying they showed a lack of empathy and understanding of the roots of poverty.

“These people, who we sometimes describe as homeless or linked to begging, are actually concrete expressions of the social inequalities and the accumulated problems we face,” the president said. “The vulnerable are not our enemies.”

(Reporting by Marc FrankEditing by Peter Graff)