Wage reform off to slow start in Cuba, report says

* Only 25 percent of companies said to embrace reform

* Workers and managers alike know little about new law

* Raul Castro's reform "still in diapers," magazine says

By Marc Frank

HAVANA, May 11 (Reuters) - More than a year after Cuban President Raul Castro pushed through a wage reform aimed at rewarding productive workers most state-run companies have yet to implement it, the official Bohemia magazine reported.

It was the latest evidence that Castro's efforts to modernize the communist country's economy were being resisted by a state bureaucracy that controls more than 90 percent of economic activity.

The decree promulgated by Castro was supposed to lift wage caps and replace a collective wage system with one based on piecework as a centerpiece of his program to raise Cuba's economic output.

But Bohemia said in its latest issue available this week that a recent labor ministry inspection found that "only 25 percent of the companies inspected used some variant of the piecework system."

A law leasing vacant state lands to anyone willing to till them was also stalled by bureaucracy, Raul himself admitted late last year, though land grants have increased since then.