Category: EFE

The IIFT’s research is also being applied to the harvesting of mamey sapote and focuses on the behavior of the fruits according to the state of maturation, the climate conditions and soil characteristics by region.

“The avocado, rich in vitamins D and E, potassium, folic acid and natural fats, can be planted throughout the year, provided that, among other factors, water is available to guarantee the plant’s requirements,” said IIFT director Guillermo Almenares.

With regards to the mamey, a fruit with a red pulp greatly appreciated for its digestive and antibiotic properties, Almenares said that they have selected artificially developed varieties that can be harvested at various periods of the year.

The Tropical Fruit Research Institute, based in Havana, is in charge of providing the scientific and technical base to achieve sustainability and competitiveness for the fruit agroindustry in Cuba.

On the island there are more than 300 agricultural cooperatives responsible for maintaining a stable and diverse supply of fruits in the state agricultural markets and hotels, a mission that is not always fulfilled in the case of the markets that serve the population.

Cuba has 10.9 million hectares of total area, of which about 6.2 million are agricultural and 3.3 million are forested.

Within the economic reforms promoted by former President Raúl Castro, one of the objectives of the Cuban Government is to encourage local food production, since the island spends about 2.5 billion dollars a year to import food.

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His message for World Press Freedom Day, celebrated tomorrow, May 3, complements the forum that will be held today by the IAPA, the Inter-American Institute for Democracy (IID), the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba and Fundamedios.

The forum will hear presentations from, among others, the Cuban journalist, writer and analyst Carlos Alberto Montaner, exiled in Miami and president of IID, independent Cuban journalist Yoani Sánchez, and Ricardo Trotti, the executive director of the IAPA, an organization that addresses written and digital press in the entire continent.

Mohme said in his message that, just between May 2017 and today, 23 journalists have been killed in the exercise of their profession.

Brazil, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, the scenes of some of these crimes, are “functional” democracies like many of the countries in the region, but, Mohme points out, “restrictions on the practice of journalism proliferate” despite this.

Obstacles range from regulations and decrees to financial strangulation of the media, censorship, harassment and ultimately death.

Mohme also referred to the “authoritarianism still existing” in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and emphasized that it was for this reason that he defended, at the 8^th Summit of the Americas held in Lima, Peru in April, the need to persevere in the promotion of democracy and the denunciation of violations of human rights.

“We will only cease our demands when all Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Cubans have the right to freely elect their representatives, dissent is respected, and they can exercise the rights of assembly, movement and expression,” he said.

Mohme also said that the digital revolution presents new scenarios and challenges in relation to freedoms and stressed that the IAPA is dedicated to incorporating principles into the Declaration of Chapultepec that address new developments in technology.

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The first thirteen months of this investment, with 100 percent Cuban capital, will focus on constructing the basement and access areas, and then the rest of the building will be built over a period of two and a half years, according to information from Almest cited by the Cuban News Agency (ACN).

The new hotel, planned to open in 2022, will outshine its neighbor, the emblematic 25-story Habana Libre, which stands 416 feet high, which after its opening in 1958 was the tallest hotel in Latin America.

Currently the tallest structure in Havana is the monument to Cuban hero José Martí, a tiered pyramid that stands 466 feet above the Plaza of the Revolution. From the top of the monument visitors can enjoy a 360-degree panoramic view of the entire city.

Almest reports that there are other 5-star hotel projects planned for Cuba’s capital city, in an investment program that contemplates the construction of 7,500 rooms by the year 2025.

Last year, Havana premiered the Grand Hotel Manzana Kempinski, Cuba’s first five-star-plus luxury tourist facility, built with 100% Cuban capital by Almest and the Union of Military Constructions International Economic Association (UCM)-Bouygues.

Official projections by Cuban tourist authorities for 2018 anticipate five million visitors, with the aim of breaking the previous records of almost 4.7 and 4.5 million travelers who arrived on the island in 2017 and 2016, respectively.

But to accommodate these aspirations for tourism growth new hotels must be opened, including 15 this year alone, with the goal of having more than 100,000 rooms by 2030 in the country’s main cities.

Cuba currently has some 68,000 rooms in 366 hotels, more than half of which are operated by 88 contracts with 20 international chains.

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The Cuban foreign ministry is reacting to the protests that have been taking place in the Central American country since April 18, due to the failed social security reform promoted by Ortega’s government. Several sectors of the population are demanding that Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, both resign.

The demonstrations are continuing despite the fact that the Nicaraguan president withdrew his proposed measures.

Since the protests began a week ago, violent clashes have left at least 42 dead and 48 missing, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh).

In the statement, Cuba’s Foreign Ministry noted its “commitment to the principles of the proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace,” signed in 2014 by the heads of the State of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and rejected “interference in the internal affairs of our sister nation.”

“The Foreign Ministry supports the sovereign efforts of the people and the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua, chaired by Commander Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, to preserve the dialogue, peace and well-being of Nicaraguans,” concluded the text, which was aired on Cuban state television.

Nicaragua and Cuba have maintained close relations during periods in which the Central American country has been governed by Ortega, which in the first period covered the entire decade of the 1980s, followed by a second period that began in 2007.

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He emphasized, however, the academic rigor of the analysis of the situation of social, economic and cultural rights in Cuba from different perspectives.

According to his words, the authors “live in the so-called gray area, and are children of the revolution. This is not a research effort carried out from exile.”

At the event at the headquarters of the Atlantic Institute of Government, launched by José María Aznar in 2014, editor Marlene Azor denied the reality of the proclaimed achievements of the Castro revolution in the fields of health, education, access to water, culture and housing.

She criticized the Government of Cuba for ending the publication of poverty rates more than 20 years ago and recalled that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its “subsidies,” things that had been considered social rights have ceased to be so.

“There is no social equality in the dictatorship,” she said, calling into question the existence of revolutionary successes and added that “there is no such success.”

Azor affirmed that there was a “national famine” in the early nineties and its existence has been denied by the Cuban government.

According to her data, the only improvements that the island’s economy has experienced since then is a slight increase in consumption and a reduction in power cuts, but she pointed out that “the level of precariousness is very important.”

She dismissed the official unemployment figure of 3.5% and reported that unemployment among the working age population of the Island reaches 28%, while incomes, she explained, are barely sufficient to cover anything other than food.

She also highlighted the absence of the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining in the country, and added that the country also lacks “freedom of employment.”

“All professionals are captives of state companies,” and do not even have the right to strike, said Azor, consistent with the fact that professionals are forbidden to practice independently, outside the state.

In her opinion, Cuba is “worse than any country with marginal capitalism” and cited as an example Haiti “where workers can strike.”

The housing deficit is another of the social deficiencies denounced by the book’s editor, who argued that at least 1.2 million homes are needed to meet the Island’s demand.

According to the data managed by Azor, only 5.7% of the population has running water 24 hours a day while for a large part of the population water is delivered via tanker trucks, which in common parlance are called “pipes.”

“It is a lie the size of the Eiffel Tower that no one is homeless in Cuba,” she said when referring to the state budget cuts, which she said have also affected social rights.

“Yes there are the rich and the very poor” in Cuba, said Azor.

Chaguaceda and Azor agreed in emphasizing the limitations of the expected political reforms which, they pointed out, could restart the initiatives begun with the support for cooperatives in 2011, which were paralyzed in 2017.

For Chaguaceda there will be “evolution, not transition” with the disappearance of the Castro brothers’ political scenario and he indicated that “everything points to (Miguel) Diaz-Canel,” the current vice president as the country’s next strongman.

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The fifty-eight-year-old Díaz-Canel was proclaimed president of the Council of State and Council of Ministers by Cuba’s National Assembly after being voted into office by 603 of its 604 deputies, an electoral margin of 99.83%.

Díaz-Canel replaces eighty-six-year-old Raúl Castro, who left office after two terms.

Almagro claims that Díaz-Canel was chosen by the National Assembly “without the free expression of the Cuban people,” noting that “when a people’s sovereignty is ignored, it deligitimizes of the authority of its rulers.”

“A regime that imprisons and silences opponents and dissidents, which has eliminated freedom of expression, which has carried out selective executions of political prisoners, is not a system which can be assimilated or whose political practices are acceptable in this hemisphere in 2018,” says Almagro.

“Our hemisphere,” he added, “must continue to demand democracy, freedom, human rights, accountability and that dictators be brought before Inter-American and international courts of justice.

Cuba was suspended from OAS in 1962 after the triumph Cuban revolution, led by Fidel Castro. Although the organization’s member states lifted that suspension in 2009, Cuba has so far declined to rejoin.

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The first president of Cuba in almost 60 years who will not be named Castro and who will not wear a military uniform (if we exclude the case of Osvaldo Dorticós, who formally filled the presidential chair under Fidel Castros’s rule and committed suicide in 1983), will lead the generational change promised by his predecessor, in a meticulously designed succession whose objective is to ensure the survival of the socialist system.

Belonging to a generation that did not participate in the struggle of the Sierra Maestra, educated in communist orthodoxy and marked in his youth by the socialism sponsored by the extinct USSR, Díaz-Canel is a man of the Communist Party (PCC) who has climbed, step by step and without histrionics, the rungs of power until reaching the highest leadership level.

“He is not an upstart nor unprepared,” said Raul Castro when in 2013 Diaz-Canel was appointed first vice president, the regime’s number two, which became his launching pad for the presidency.

Born in Placetas in 1960, this electronic engineer who turns 58 on Friday began his political career in 1987 in the Union of Young Communists (UJC) at the Central University of Las Villas, where he worked as a teacher.

Seven years later and, after progressing in the ranks of the UJC and joining the PCC, he was appointed first secretary of the party in his native province of Villa Clara.

There he left the imprint of a person accessible and close to the people during the hard times of the so-called Special Period in a Time of Peace, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its enormous economic support for the Island. In Villa Clara he could be seen touring the neighborhoods by bike or on foot, dancing at festive events and even supporting initiatives such as El Mejunje, a pioneering center in transvestite shows which become a symbol of the struggle for LGTBQI rights.

In 2003 he took a major step in his career: in addition to being named first secretary of the Party in the province of Holguín, he joined the all-powerful Political Bureau of the PCC.

He was already in General Raul Castro’s sights, who at that time emphasized Diaz-Canel’s “high sense of collective work and effectiveness with subordinates” and his “strong ideological firmness.”

His move to the national government came in 2009 as Minister of Higher Education. Four years later, in 2013, he was elevated to first vice president of the Councils of State and of Ministers, “a defining step in shaping the future direction of the country,” Raúl Castro announced at that time.

With a serious mien and somewhat cold and expressionless in his official appearances, Díaz-Canel is an experienced politician who has behaved cautiously, aware of the risks involved in being tempted by “the honey of power.”

Temptations that ended in the defenestration of previous “dauphins” of Castroism, including Roberto Robaina and Carlos Lage, two of the failed promises of the Fidelista era that attracted the spotlight more than Castro allowed.

Now, as “number two,” Díaz-Canel has become visible to Cubans and internationally: on the island his appearance in the state media has been constant and in the last five years he has made numerous international visits and tours.

In his public speeches, Díaz-Canel has exhibited a discourse faithful to revolutionary orthodoxy, with continuous references of loyalty to Fidel and Raúl Castro and to the historical generation that fought in the Sierra Maestra.

Like his mentor, Díaz-Canel is not a friend of lavish personal displays before the media and even less so before international ones, although he has spoken on several occasions of ending the secrecy of news sources and has admitted limitations in the official media.

One aspect that distinguishes him from his predecessors is a certain sensitivity to promoting new technologies in Cuba – among the countries in the world with the least access to the Internet – but with a view to counteracting the “pseudo-cultural avalanche,” “the banal” and “the subversive,” in order to replace it with the “contents of the Revolution.”

The challenges Díaz-Canel faces are as many as the uncertainties he arouses.

Having ruled out a political transition, the candidate is called to complete the reforms that Raúl Castro has left pending such as ending the Island’s dual currency system, expanding private work, growing foreign investment and improving the precarious salaries in the state sector.

Another question is how he will manage the battered relations with the United States after the brakes imposed by the Trump administration on the thaw between the two nations.

And one of the most interesting enigmas is how he will consolidate his own leadership, both before the population and in the complex balances of power in Cuba between the Communist Party, the Armed Forces and the Government, and between the reformist and orthodox sectors.

Diaz-Canel is a leader circumspect about his family life, although it is known that he has two children from his first marriage.

His second wife is Liz Cuesta, an academic expert in Cuban culture who has been seen in numerous public events, where she projects herself, in an unprecedented image in revolutionary Cuba, as a “first lady” of the country.

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The Network, made up of young people from 20 countries, reiterates that its members will participate in the Social Summit that will take place as a complement to the presidents’ meeting, and expresses its hope that “the Peruvian authorities will be able to guarantee the security” of its members and delegates from Cuban and Venezuelan civil society.

The president of the Network, Rosa María Payá, and the coordinator, Jatzel Roman González, urge the Peruvian authorities not to “tolerate” what they say happened at the previous Summit in Panama, in 2015, “the ‘neighborhood bully’ attitude of the Castro delegation.”

The letter emphasizes that in Panama “shock troops of the Castro regime, led at that time by the current Minister of Culture of the dictatorship, Abel Prieto, attacked with blows and shouts formally accredited members of civil society of the Americas.”

“Three years later, the goal of the Cuban regime remains the same: to prevent the Civil Society Summit from being held because a dictatorship cannot tolerate sharing space with those who peacefully oppose their repressive actions and dare to express it,” the letter adds.

The Latin American Youth Network and the delegation of independent Cuban civil society at the Social Summit are already suffering “aggressions by the Cuban regime,” they point out.

The letter mentions an episode with the Cuban ambassador at the Hemispheric Dialogue in Lima, who “lashed out against Jorge Vallejo, the Peruvian representative who served as spokesman for Coalition 26 and director of our Network.”

The letter also refers to a message on the official Twitter account of the Cuban Foreign Ministry in which it warns that “Cuba will not allow offenses, disrespect or provocation” from the Latin American Youth Network during the Summit.

“Given all the threats and aggressions launched from the institutions and the Castro media, we are obliged to hold the Government in Cuba and the Peruvian authorities responsible for the physical integrity of all of our members,” the signatories of the letter write.

Payá and González also warn of the “dangerous error and incoherence of extending an invitation [to the Summit] to the representatives of the Cuban dictatorship,” after praising the exclusion of representatives of the “Venezuelan dictatorship.”

At the end of the letter, the Network’s directors state: “Our young people are not controlled by fear, we will continue peacefully fighting dictatorships from one end of our region to the other.”

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The persistent rumors about the imminent unification of the two currencies, reflecting the Cuban government’s plan to eliminate the CUC which it began working on in 2013, has caused hundreds of Cubans to go to banks and currency exchanges in recent weeks to get rid of Cuban convertible pesos and exchange them for Cuban pesos (also known as “national money”), dollars or euros.

The official statement insists that “the CUC will continue in circulation until such time as its withdrawal is decided on as a part of the monetary unification process, an event that will be officially announced.”

“The date for the beginning of the process of monetary unification has not been set,” stresses the agency, which also insists on the permanence of the current rate of exchange.

Finally, the Central Bank noted that during the 7th Congress of the Communist Party of  Cuba there was “once again, the decision to guarantee deposits in bank accounts in foreign currencies, CUC and CUP, as well as the cash held by the population.”

Last December, during his most recent speech before the National Assembly, President Raúl Castro urged that the unification process be completed and described the elimination of the double currency as “the most important process” that needed to happen to advance his reforms.

“No one can calculate the high cost that the persistence of duality has meant for the state sector, which favors the unfair inverted pyramid: where there is greater responsibility, there is lower remuneration,” Castro said in his remarks.

He also warned that the situation promotes the migration of skilled workers to the non-state sector, which pays higher salaries and pays them in CUC.

Although the CUC is officially quoted at a value of 24 CUP, several official exchange rates coexist in the accounts of State enterprises in Cuba, which, according to some analysts, generates strong distortions that make it impossible to caculate the real state of the Centralized Cuban economy.

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Chicken, one of the most consumed foods, will be reduced by up to 30% compared to its price in the retail network, says Granma, which acknowledges that the Cuban government is responding to “one of the most repeated demands of those who exercise the new non-state forms of management in the country.”

“To the extent that conditions permit, this experience will be extended to the self-employed in units leased” to the State, explained the Minister of Domestic Trade, Mary Blanca Ortega.

For now available only in the capital city, the next wholesale markets will open “gradually” in the rest of the island, “once this initial proposal is in optimal operation and depending on the places where more self-employment exist,” said the article.

In Cuba today there are more than half a million private or “self-employed” workers, who are engaged in categories of work permitted by the Cuban Government.

More than 12,000 are members of non-agricultural cooperatives, which already number about 420 throughout the country, the vast majority of them dedicated to food services, commerce, other services, construction and industry.

Located in the Havana municipality of Plaza of the Revolucion, Mercabal will open from Monday to Saturday with products from ten direct suppliers, which will replenish the market according to the customers’ monthly orders.

In order to use the services of the new market, the self-employed person must have updated their client file and have an account with a magnetic card, issued by the state-owned Banco Metropolitano.

The 2010 expansion of private work — which includes non-agricultural cooperatives — has been one of the key reforms of the government of the outgoing Cuban leader Raul Castro to update the socialist model and reduce the overlarge workforce of the state sector.

As of last August, the Island began a process of reordering “cuentapropismo” (self-employment), as a part of which the issuing of licenses to private restaurants and tourist rentals, among other activities, has been temporarily halted to curb illegalities, “deviations” and “correct deficiencies.”

The licenses no longer being issued are precisely those in most demand among the would-be self-employed.

Although it promised that the new measure would not be in effect “for a very long period of time,” the Cuban government has not yet resumed the delivery of licenses to Cuba’s self-employed, who already represent 12% of the country’s labor force.

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In fact, in the last eight years, the use of remittances has broadened to cover some of Cubans’ other needs, such as the costs of mobile phones, internet accounts, vacations and business investments.

Today even the purchase of cars, spare parts, mortgage payments, medical insurance and private tutors for college entrance exams are necessities that are paid for with remittances from the US, where more than 90% of them originate.

THCG predicts that remittances from the United States will rise to 5.285 billion dollars in 2025.

However, this economic landscape of family remittances — characterized as one of “transformation, diversification and growth” — is impacted by a banking system that lacks the infrastructure to offer adequate payment services and delivery channels.

“More than half a million private sector Cuban business people generate thousands of financial transactions daily that do not go through Cuban banks because the conditions do not exist to handle them,” writes Emilio Morales, president of THCG, in the company’s extensive report, which sheds light the Cuban consumer market.

Morales adds that a large part of these transactions are handled through “payment networks of remittance agencies and other informal channels.”

A financial activity that, according to the expert, costs Cuban banks tens of millions of dollars in potential profits every year “because they do not have the technological and digitized infrastructure capable of offering these services.”

There is currently no banking transfer system between US financial institutions and Cuban banks, and Cubans have “limited access to tools” that allow them to receive money directly from their bank accounts.

In this context, Cuban banks have a “great opportunity to insert themselves into the remittance payment networks” and to “create formal channels for Cuban entrepreneurs to conduct commercial transactions through banks.”

In addition to the fourteen existing categories, the firm has identified seven new ones for the use of remittances in the next eight years: water, electricity and mortgage payments, cruise vacations, medical insurance, car purchase or rental, and payment of cable or satellite television.

In Morales’ opinion a number of new “modalities” will have “a strong impact on the market and represent a great oportunity for Cuban banking.”

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On September 29 the Department of State asked Americans “not to travel to Cuba” because of the alleged acoustic attacks on the island between November 2016 and August of last year against 24 Americans (embassy staff or relatives), attacks of which the USA has not yet found the cause or the guilty parties.

In addition, the Trump Government withdrew 60% of the staff of the Embassy of Havana and expelled 15 diplomats from the Cuban Embassy in Washington.

“The consequences of the actions of the Department of State have negatively affected not only US companies and institutions that send travelers to Cuba for educational purposes, but the lack of Embassy staff in Havana has also made obtaining visas very difficult,” said Kate Simpson, president of Academic Travel Abroad.

In January, the government changed Cuba’s destination category and included it in Category 3, a rating that according to the tourism sector is “unjustifiable” due to the lack of real evidence that these attacks even happened.

For nations in Category 3, the United States recommends its citizens “avoid traveling due to serious security risks.”

This group also includes five other Latin American countries: Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

On the other hand, the State Department is facing a deadline this week for the requirement that, six months after the reduction of the Embassy staff in Cuba, that staff must be reassigned to another location or returned to the same site.

In 2017, almost three times as many Americans traveled to Cuba compared to the previous year, according to data from the Cuban Foreign Ministry.

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