During Friday's parliamentary session, he criticized the "bureaucratic red tape" preventing the government from completing payments to the individual farmers and cooperatives producing 65 percent of the island's vegetables.
In excerpts of his comments on Friday night on state television, Castro also criticized efforts to improve Cuba's dilapidated public transportation, saying it is "practically on the point of collapse."
Phil Peters, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in suburban Washington, said the willingness to blame systemic problems rather than the moral failings of individuals was underscored in October in a newspaper series on petty corruption.
The Communist youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde told of a state cafeteria where patrons who paid for one-third of a liter of beer got one-fourth instead, letting employees skim the difference from the cash register. A government-employed cobbler charged three times the official rate because he had to buy his own supplies.
The articles told Cubans the government recognizes "that law enforcement alone is not the solution to the problem," Peters wrote in a recent institute newsletter.
"The article did not say what Cuba's interim president believes would inspire allegiance to the revolutionary project if old war stories do not suffice; that question was left hanging," Peters said.
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