14ymedio, Elías Amor Bravo, Economist, 30 April 2022 — Where is the embargo? Day in and day out, the communist leaders parade the intensification of the U.S. embargo/blockade as the origin of all the ills of the Cuban economy. And it turns out that these leaders contradict the news published by the official press of the regime.
The State newspaper Granma boasts in the run-up to May 1st of the signing of no less than 18 agreements this past week by the Castro consortium BioCubaFarma with Cuban and foreign entities.
I insist: where is the embargo? If this fiction created by the Cuban communists to hide their responsibilities really existed, this type of agreement would be impracticable, impossible. But no. The 18 agreements between companies of the BioCubaFarma group and Cuban and foreign entities indicate that there is no restriction whatsoever for Cuba to trade, receive investments, capital or any type of aid from 192 countries in the world.
There is, however, a dispute with the United States that regulates the scope of relations between the two countries, which, moreover, has its well-defined origin in the practices of the communist regime towards its northern neighbor, which has refused from the beginning to negotiate.
Nevertheless, BioCubaFarma’s agreements are implemented, as are the agreements with Vietnam, with Spanish hoteliers, Canadian or Dutch miners, etc. The Cuban economy is one of the most open in the world, receives donations from numerous countries that support the “revolution” and establishes, when it deems it convenient, the most controversial alliances, as in this case, in the field of biotechnology.
The agreements, moreover, have not fallen from the sky. They have been well worked out, despite the “threat” of the embargo, and have been presented as one of the results of the BioHabana-2022 International Congress, which concluded last Friday. Someone from the organizing committee of the congress told Granma “we exceeded a thousand participants, including Cubans and foreigners from 51 countries, although 10% participated virtually; in addition, more than 600 papers were presented in conferences, short oral presentations and posters.”
Indeed, it is very difficult for a blockaded or embargoed country to hold this type of international congresses, even to promote conference tourism, which is catered for in the formidable luxury hotels of the capital, close to the collapsed buildings, the destroyed streets and the rubble plots of that marvel that was long ago the world’ s old Havana.
Other information published in Granma that questions the embargo is the agreement signed by Cuba and Argentina concerning the housing sector, after the celebration of the XIII International Construction Fair Fecons-2022, which concluded this Friday.
This was a convention aimed at improving the production of construction materials in Cuba, with the participation of state-owned and foreign companies, non-agricultural cooperatives and MSMEs. There they talked about goods needed for Cuba to boost its industrial and housing construction sector, such as plaster, mortars, additives, and the repair and maintenance of equipment, and new investments in technology to achieve efficiency with a rational use of the workforce, but with diligence.
But the event led to the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Argentina’s Ministry of Territorial Development and Habitat and Cuba’s Ministry of Construction, with the reciprocal interest of promoting the economic progress and integration of Latin America and the Caribbean and collaboration in the housing sector.
Under this agreement, emphasis was given to the family of medium, fine and special pegaporcelain mortars; ceramic tiles decorated with digital printing; gray clinker for cement and the housing cell construction system. This is the embargo/blockade, one more example that the arguments used by the regime are not true.
For the record, this blog will never be against the Cuban economy maintaining its openness to the outside world and obtaining these types of agreements, and even better ones. Cuban biotechnology should advance as much as possible, since it is one of the technologies that encourage the development of the fourth industrial revolution. Betting on this sector could be an intelligent decision. And the same goes for the manufacture of construction materials, whose scarce production has forced the regime to increase its prices significantly.
What we will always denounce in this blog is that the ills of the Cuban economy are attributed to something that does not exist, the embargo/blockade, or that only exists in the imagination of a regime that lives on confrontation and provocation to its northern neighbor since Fidel Castro’s visit to the Teresa Hotel in Harlem in 1959.
A lot of rain has fallen since then, but if in anything in the expectations of the communist regime devised by Fidel Castro have been exceeded, it has been in the field of the embargo/blockade fiction, of which these Granma articles are a good example, of course, of the very opposite.
The embargo/blockade propaganda has worked for the Cuban communists for more than 60 years. It is true that when the multimillion dollar subsidies from the former USSR used to flow in, nobody remembered it, but the sign of the times shows that the relations between two neighbors, which were built by geopolitics since colonial times, were destroyed by the communist regime as soon as it came to power, and this for its own benefit, even if it was detrimental to the interests of the Cuban people.
It is difficult to find a similar process in any other country in the world.
Translated by: Hombre de Paz
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