Fernando Ravsberg

When I arrived on the island, back in 1990, one of the things that made me fall in love with the Cuban people was their never-ending source of solidarity, firstly with their families and then towards their friends, neighbors and even strangers in need.

The number of autonomous workers will hardly grow if all the restrictions on non-state forms of work aren’t relaxed, allowing cooperatives, small and medium-sized companies, and above all to expand the variety of jobs that people can legally dedicate themselves to.

There is a huge need for investment; however, there is a huge gap between analyses and decision-making, between the economy’s urgency and the calm nature of bureaucrats who are processing these investments.

Dear friends from my personal blog Cartas desde Cuba (Letters from Cuba), 2016 comes to an end and, after 51 weeks of work, we are going to take some days off starting December 24th. It has been a period of great effort but also of results, the greatest of which we owe to you. [Cartas is also published in English by Havana Times.]

An application for mobile devices that allows tracking a postal shipment, telegram or national and international money wires is now available to any customer of the Cuban postal company Empresa de Correos de Cuba. However the delivery process is still at a snail’s pace.

Maybe we are at the crossroads of a new beginning. When signing the agreement in Brussels, Cuban Ambassador, Bruno Rodriguez, said that the “European Union and Cuba’s bilateral ties won’t go through Washington.” It would be very wise for both parties if this were the case.

Fidel Castro’s death highlights the need for a generational transfer. It is already more or less defined what will happen in the political and economic superstructure in the coming two years, with First Vice President Miguel Díaz Canel leading a government team of his generation. However what about Cuban youth?

Fidel Castro’s death hasn’t changed anything or rather, to not be black and white, it has changed very little in the island´s situation. The Commander-in-Chief wanted to spend the last decade of his life as a “soldier of ideas”, who didn’t intervene – at least publicly – in national matters.

He was perhaps the only enemy of Washington in Latin America that they could never defeat, even though a dozen presidents proposed it, with hundreds of assassination attempts, an invasion, creating armed groups and blocking the economy of the island for over 50 years.