"Reading The Riot Act" In Cuba
Tap any Cuban on the shoulder and ask for their pet gripe and the answer is bound to be food, housing or transportation, if not all three. These are the main problems confronting the Cuban Government and there are signs that the government is scrambling to find solutions, least popular discontent upset what has so far been a smooth succession of power from Fidel Castro to his younger brother Raul.
A brief article in the official Communist Party daily, Granma Monday suggests authorities are reading the riot act to local authorities. It quotes Deputy Minister of Economics and Planning Magalys Calvo telling elected officials in predominately agricultural Camaguey province that the country must reduce its dependence on imported foodstuffs in 2007.
Cuba imports 84% of the food destined for the basic shopping cart at a cost of "some one billion dollars" with most of government spending going for these imported foodstuffs and petroleum, Calvo is reported as saying.
For a multitude of reasons, Cuba faces serious problems with increasing domestic food production, among them inefficiencies, bureaucratic hurdles, thievery, corruption and shortages of supplies and spare parts. Last December, Raul Castro, acting President since his older brother Fidel fell ill last July, said it was "inexplicable" that bureaucrats were holding up payments to the farm cooperatives that grow 65% of Cuba's food. And he said he encouraged the Cuban press to take the unusually candid step of running a recent series of articles on corruption.
Although not reported in Monday's article, Cuba has since 2001 paid cash totaling nearly $150 million to American farmers and agricultural producers for such basic products as rice, chicken, beans and eggs. These food sales are permitted under a 2000 Congressional exemption from the 45 year old embargo against the Castro government. And these sales are not limited to food. A Colorado businessman told me this week he's hoping to obtain a contract for at least some of the 47,000 electricity/telephone poles made of treated yellow pine needed by Cuba as it upgrades its electricity grid.
Other goals reported set forth by Calvo include increasing exports and efficiency in the tourism sector. In the '90s tourism became the driving force in an economy brought to its knees by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries—until then the island's main trading partners. However, the focus on tourism as a lucrative sector has waned in recent years as economic ties with Venezuela and China have supplanted it in importance. Cuba imports at little cost 90,000 barrels a day of petroleum from Venezuela and sources say it is reselling some 60,000 of them on the Caribbean market.
Despite this shift in priorities, more than two million tourists annually have vacationed in Cuba during the last three years. Most come from Canada and Europe, accounting for an estimated income of $2 billion a year. In addition, a decrease in tourism would not be welcomed by the thousands of lucky Cubans working in the industry. Hotel and resort workers, not to mention taxi drivers make up a privileged class, earning tips in convertible currency that gives them access to products from cooking oil to shampoo not available in Cuban pesos, the legal tender earned by the vast majority of the population employed by the State.