Business & Economy

Brazil’s Petrobras oil company will not continue the search for oil in Cuban waters, Marco Aurelio García, special advisor to the Brazilian presidency, announced in statements to the press accredited on the island. However, the official pointed out, there are possibilities of cooperation in the area of lubricants.

Cuba should increase the energy saving measures to face the oil price hike, Rafael Tenreiro, assistant director of the state-run Cuba Petróleo (CUPET) oil company, affirmed. “The international situation is of much uncertainty,” and “it is impossible to predict how much more the prices will go up,” the official said. The island produces half of the fuel it needs and the rest is imported from Venezuela at preferential prices.

The US government authorized eight airports to offer charter flights to and from Cuba, the US Customs and Border Protection services reported. Before that, only Miami, New York and Los Angeles had air links with the island. Those benefitting by the new exceptions in the travel ban include Cuban Americans in general as well as academics, students, artists and organized groups with educational and religious ends.

The airport of the US city of Tampa was authorized by the Barack Obama administration to carry out flights to Cuba, according to the Chamber of Commerce of that city, where a community of around 100,000 persons of Cuban origin live. Cuban-Americans can travel freely to Cuba while ordinary US citizens need a special license from the US Treasury Dept. to legally visit the island.

Cuba’s agriculture authorities will try to re-launch in the next five years coffee production on the island, which dropped from 60,000 tons in 1961 to ten times less at present. The collapse of this sector is due, among other reasons, to the lack of qualified labour force, the poor care of the crops and insufficient payment to producers.

The Cuban authorities expect the number of persons linked to self-employment will soon double, Idalmys Alvarez, director of employment at the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, announced. Between October 2010 and last January, 113,618 persons were authorized to carry out activities in the private sector, one fifth of them in food sales.

The lack of sugarcane and the irregularities in the yield of the sugar mills could do away with the plans of the Cuban authorities for the current harvest, the island’s state-run press warned today. The results in 2010 of the former flourishing sugar industry were the worse in more than a century.

The Dutch KLM Airline Company will carry out three weekly flights between Havana and Amsterdam starting October 31, the French Air Journal site reported. The flights will transport a maximum of 285 passengers. KLM currently links the Netherlands with 68 destinations in the rest of the world.

Cuba’s government again increased the price of gasoline and diesel by between four and eight per cent. This is the second hike in six months, after last September the Ministry of Finance and Prices responded to the rise in oil prices on the international market with another increase.