Business & Economy

Cuba expects to obtain new cacao harvests in five years as a result of the planting of new plantations in the Guamuhaya Mountains, in the central province of Cienfuegos, by farmer women from one of the area’s co-ops, said Raúl Chaviano, assistant director of the Eladio Machín Agricultural Industrial Company.

Representatives of the Cuban opposition described as neoliberal the economic reforms announced by the island’s government, which include the laying off of half a million state workers. “The combination of massive layoffs with the way in which self-employment is being reintroduced and with a new foreign capital project, hidden from Cuban citizens, is the opening to the late, harsh and primary neoliberalism,” states the document presented in this capital by Manuel Cuesta Morúa, of the Arco Progresista social democratic coalition.

The Havana Club Company expects a recovery in its exports this year to reach the 3.6 million boxes of rum sold on the international market, after a three per cent decline in 2009 due to the economic crisis, said Marc Beuve-Mery, director of the association between Cuba Ron S.A. and the French group Pernod Ricard.

Cuba surpassed for the seventh consecutive year the figure of two million tourists, on this occasion 12 days before as compared to 2009, according to a Ministry of Tourism communiqué. This figure represents a three per cent growth in this sector, considered last decade as the locomotive of the Cuban economy.

The Cuban scientific community is seeking new varieties of agricultural products resistant to extreme conditions such as intense droughts and hurricanes, which could become more frequent due to climate change, Sergio Rodríguez, director of the National Institute of Research on Tropical Tubers, affirmed. According to the specialist, that institution has a world-renowned germ plasm bank

Baracoa, the first city founded in Cuba by the Spanish colonizers, has recovered 90.4 per cent of the homes affected by Hurricane Ike and the March 2008 coastal flooding, Alicia Licet Noa, director of the Housing Investment Municipal Unit, announced. The hurricanes that hit the country two years ago damaged more than 300,000 homes throughout the Caribbean island nation.

Cuban authorities hope the upcoming 2010-2011 sugar harvest’s production will be similar to last year’s, the worse since 1905, Adrián Jiménez Fernández, deputy minister of that sector, affirmed. Thirty-nine sugar mills throughout the island, a former sugar exporting power, will be operating in this harvest, which will begin on December 1.

The fibre-optic underwater cable that will join Cuba with Venezuela will be operative by July 2011, Alberto Rodríguez Arufe, deputy minister of informatics and communications, announced. The cable, which will increase by 3,000 times the current speed of data, image and voice transmission in the island, will cost 70 million dollars.

Cuba doubled the number of intermediate-level technical careers linked to the agricultural sector to around 19,500, with a network of educational centers that covers almost all the country’s municipalities, Kenelma Carvajal, deputy minister of education, announced. The official also stressed the increase in the income of specialists related to construction. Both increases correspond to a government strategy to reduce the workforce deficit in those sectors.