Cuba 2024
Pre-1959 Cuba
“Always troubled by the presence of the country’s black majority, the white settlers sought to maintain their dominant position by endlessly calling for immigration from Europe. This was often purposely encouraged by the racist
ruling elites, both before and after liberation from Spain in 1898. Their avowed aim of 'whitening’ the population, and keeping the white settlers numerically on top, was largely successful. Waves of immigrants continued to
arrive in Cuba from Spain until the early 1930s (including Angel Castro, Fidel’s father). By the middle of the twentieth century, the black element in the population had declined - according to the official statistics - from over
50 per cent to less than 30 per cent.” (Richard Gott, Cuba – A New History, 2004)
“In 1954 a young revolutionary lawyer accurately prophesied, in his testimony to a court trying him for the attack on the Moncada barracks, that history would absolve him: "Cuba," he said in his resounding defence plea, "continues to be a producer of raw materials. We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows." Cuba bought not only automobiles, machinery, chemical products, paper, and clothing, but also rice and beans, garlic and onions, fats, meat, and cotton, all from the United States. Ice cream came from Miami, bread from Atlanta, and even luxury suppers from Paris. The country of sugar imported nearly half the fruit and vegetables it consumed, although only a third of its population had regular jobs and half of the sugar estate lands were idle acres where nothing was produced. Thirteen U.S. sugar producers owned more than 47 percent of the total area planted to cane and garnered some $180 million from each harvest. The subsoil wealth--nickel, iron, copper, manganese, chrome, tungsten--formed part of the United States' strategic reserves and were exploited in accordance with the varying priorities of U.S. defence and industry. In 1958 Cuba had more registered prostitutes than mine workers and a million and a half Cubans were wholly or partly unemployed.” (Edward Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America)
In a paper published the University of California Press, Katrin Hansing wrote: “by the 1980s Cuba had become a relatively egalitarian society. It had low levels of racial inequality in key areas of professional and social life. The revolution had instilled an ideal of egalitarianism that was shared by most of the population.” Hansing then goes on to tackle inequality and race in Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union:
“Few social transformations have attacked social inequalities more thoroughly than the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and Cuba's subsequent economic crisis, however, the island's celebrated social achievements of equality, full-scale public employment, and high-quality universal education and health care have been seriously affected. Today, Cuban society is marked by rising levels of poverty and inequality, growing unemployment, dwindling social services, and continuous outward migration. Moreover, in the context of a changing economy, defined by the declining role of the state and the introduction of market mechanisms, new social stratifications are emerging—and doing so along clearly visible racial lines. Inequality and race, both dominant themes in pre-Revolutionary Cuba that the Revolution fought hard to eliminate, have once again become key overlapping issues.“
Richard Gott wrote in 2004:
“Many things have changed over 40 years, rather more have remained the same, for one of the usually forgotten charms of Communist governments is their capacity to stop the dock. Regimes that once wanted to change the world, and promote modernity in all its forms, have often remained resolutely conservative in practice, possibly to the satisfaction of their peoples.
“Ironically, by surrendering to the inevitable and by reintroducing Cubans to the seductions of capitalism very gradually, Castro may have performed his last great revolutionary service to his country.”
Cynicism and discontent is not new in Cuba. Its existence is acknowledged by the top brass. When asked in 1997 about the general attitude of the population towards the Revolution, General José Ramón Fernández, veteran leader of the battles against the invaders at the Bay of Pigs, replied openly,
“I don't mean ... that there are no discontented people in Cuba, or people who disagree with socialism ... We have shortages, privations, difficulties. We run risks; there are dangers. There are people who are more consumer-oriented, who would like a more comfortable life, without struggles. There are people who perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, place a shirt, a pair of pants, or a car, above the country's sovereignty or above social justice, and these people are clearly not enthusiastic about the Revolution.” (quoted in Gott 2004)
Castro “has changed his slogan from 'socialism or death’, suitable for the violent twentieth century, to a better world is possible, appropriate for the more pacifistic revolutionaries of a new era. When he dies, there will be little change in Cuba. While few people have been looking, the change has already taken place.” (Gott 2004. My emphasis, N.M.). In 2024, next to the famous Habana Libre hotel the slogan ‘Motherland or Death’ is still there.
Fidel Castro died in 2016. When I first visited Cuba in 2015, my visit was too short to understand or find out about what had happened since Gott wrote his pertinent analysis and comments. Now it is 2024. Do the shortages, privation and discontent General Fernández mentioned still exist in today’s Cuba? How much capitalism or capitalist elements could we talk about? How does a Cuba that is “no longer run in the new millennium by a group of ageing, white-bearded guerrilla fighters from the 1950s,” but “by young graduates from the island’s universities and technical schools, often recruited from the provinces” look like?
What is obvious is that countries like Tunisia or Cuba are not turning into Sweden or even Portugal. Exceptions: South Korea, for, example, was deliberately assisted by the Western industrialised countries to industrialise in a particular ‘Cold War’ context – to counter the Soviet Union and any potential revolution. Similarly, the reconstruction of Germany was carried out in that context and conjuncture. China is another example: it has to embark on an industrial revolution it has never seen before and in a short period of time. Unlike in the West, initially the economic development was carried out without a middle class, i.e. without a bourgeoisie.
In the case of Cuba, the attempt since Castro’s 1995 move to gradually introduce capitalist elements into a non-capitalist society, where tourism replaced sugar, has created ‘uneven and combined development’ with ‘Cuban characteristics’ and where, it is argued, like in China, there is no middle class to carry out ‘a full introduction of capitalism.’ It is arguable though that has been a ‘full introduction of capitalism’ in China. Elements of non-capitalist economy still exist.
The account below is not of a professional writer, but of an observer. It is by no means a full account of what has become of Cuba since the death of its ‘chief’. My stay in the country was mainly in two cities – Havana and Cienfuegos. I, for one, do not believe that a socialist society as envisaged by Marx and Marxists has ever existed: what existed/has existed are attempts of establishing socialism, but all attempts – in particular contexts and conjunctures – ended up with different outcomes and even contrary to what leaders and masses intended and hoped for. Marxists/socialists do not agree on the nature of the Cuban socio-economic character: ‘state capitalism’, ‘state socialism’ and ‘bureaucratic Stalinism’ are the main descriptions used by the revolutionary left when they talk about Cuba.
As of ‘communist’ is a political and ideological designation by the Western regimes, media and a few scholars and not a factual one, for the name of a ruling party, be it the Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of Vietnam, Spain's Socialist Workers' Party, or the Cuban Communist Party of Cuba, is one thing and the economic formation and social relations are another.
The state of the Cuban economy, low productivity, poverty, etc are by no means unique to Cuba or they are specific consequences of the political-economy pursued. A few capitalist countries in the world are even poorer than Cuba.
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Introduction
A people that entrusts its subsistence to one product alone commits suicide.
—José Marti
The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country, and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one.
—José Marti quoted by Che Guevara at the OAS Punta del Este conference in 1961
The [Cuban] “revolution, which grew up always punished, amounted to what it could under the circumstances, instead of to what it wanted.”
—Eduardo Galeano
“Political challenges to capitalism have often identified the ‘universality’ or ‘totality’ of capitalism as the basis on which it should be challenged and overcome. This serves as an important warning against any endeavour to build ‘socialism in one country’; anticapitalism can only be global in scope.”
—Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
According to 2024 estimates, Cuba’s GDP – not an accurate measure of a country’s ‘health or ‘development’’ anymore nowadays – was between $100bn and $137bn with a population of 11.5 million, and a high human development index. In terms of perspective, Cuba’s economy could be viewed in comparison with/in contrast to Portugal and Tunisia, as both countries have a similar population but different trajectories. GDP as a measure of development, is imperfect and potentially misleading (Stiglitz et al., 2009).
What is the background of the deep crisis in Cuba today? Speaking about Cuba after 1991, Andrés Pertierra highlights how the system kind of survived after “losing 70 percent of its foreign trade, all this aid and credit, all of this overnight. Losing that, because the USSR fell, and somehow reconsolidating and, in the 2000s, into a very poor, very anemic, but still stable system, which is not at all what people predicted in the depths of the crisis of 1993 and 1994… It’s not the just that Soviet subsidies were just in the form of military aid or general economic aid. Cuba was sucking up about a third of all Soviet aid per annum in the 1980s. It was massive. It was pissing off even the Soviets. They were like, look at Cuba, it’s taking up so much aid.
And then, they were also selling the oil for super cheap to the Cubans, and then buying sugar way above market price from the Cuban. So it was a lot of subsidies, billions and billions of dollars… Not only do they lose subsidies in the 90s, “but the embargo was there, as ferocious as ever, and they even tighten it in the 1990s to make it even more aggressive, in the hopes that — kind of an accelerationist logic — that hopefully that makes the government fall.
The 90s were absolutely brutal. People who had been fat all of their lives become rail-thin. Even if you had money, there wasn’t necessarily anything for you to buy with it. People were going temporarily blind from vitamin deficiency. The infrastructure was absolutely falling apart. If you ask any Cuban for their horror stories about that period, every single person has their own personal hell from that era, and the response of the state was to do a couple of things.” (Andrés Pertierra)
Writing about the 1991-93 crisis and the introduction of the dual monetary system, Emily Morris highlighted how the collapsing value of the peso relative to the dollar “was also a symbol of the erosion of Cuban national self-esteem, with those dependent on peso salaries becoming steadily impoverished relative not only to outsiders—the gusanos who had emigrated to the us and the new influx of tourists—but also to the thieves and jineteros at home,” including those who obtain hard currency informally or illegally through the tourist trade. “There was also a widening chasm between the heroic official rhetoric of unity and shared hardship, and the everyday reality of poverty and inequality—del dicho al hecho hay un gran trecho, as the saying went (Morris, Unexpected Cuba, NLR, 2014)
In that context came Castro’s reforms: introducing capitalist elements in the economy, replacing sugar with tourism, trying to diversify the economy, and allowing Cubans to leave the country if they wished to do so. But economically Castro did not follow China or Vietnam. Nevertheless, capitalist elements and capitalism in general are not just economic mode of production, but a whole way of life that affects all aspects of societies.
Venezuela ‘comes to the rescue’, but only for a while
With Chavez, Cuba received lots of cheap oil and subsidies. Cuba recovers, for a while.
Take agriculture, for example. In order to understand the shortage and the poor quality of los alimentos (the food) in Cuba, we need to go back to the collectivisation policy, and the lack of investment after the partial breaking up of that system.
Food in Cuba is outrageously bad for a country with a rich soil and very high percentage of arable land. The major problem is the very low productivity per person. Thus food is so expensive, and Cuba imports a lot of it as well – between 70 and per cent!
Before the ‘financial’ crisis of 2008/09, Cuba was hit by three hurricanes. In the mid of the crisis, it could not keep payment of the buses it had purchased from China. It could not purchase parts to maintain the buses, either.
Then Raul Castro takes over his brother and embarks on some market reforms.
The 2011 ‘Guidelines’ and official speeches “make plenty of references to ‘using the mechanisms’ of the market, but regard this as a component of state-directed policy, in contrast with the neoliberal doxa that have underpinned ‘transition’ strategies elsewhere. The measures taken so far have involved liberalizing elements, including expansion of the non-state sector, wider scope for foreign investment, tax concessions for special development zones and deregulation of the housing and second-hand car markets. But rather than surrendering control of the economy to the private sector, the government has accompanied these moves with measures explicitly designed to strengthen state oversight… The Cuban leadership has refused to follow the Washington Consensus framework known as the neoliberal reforms imposed on indebted Latin American countries by the IMF and World Bank.
However, partly due to the pandemic, partly due the sanctions, the reforms have been stalled and failed to deliver. Cuba today is still in the midst of the crisis: chronic power cuts, food scarcity, very low purchasing power, rising poverty, struggling, if not collapsing, healthcare, tourism has not bounced back, and Venezuela has been in a deep crisis and unable to continue sending subsidies to Cuba. With Trump, and it continues today, Cuba has been put in the list of states that sponsor ‘terrorism’ – an bluntly political move from the US that has no connection to reality.
“Cuban economic performance since the global financial crisis has been weaker than expected, with average annual GDP growth of less than 3 per cent, repeatedly missing targets.” (Morris, 2014)
“There has been little improvement in real wages in the state sector,” adds Morris who in an article written before the unification of the currency., “apart from the health-service workers who saw a hike in early 2014.” That could hardly be called a ‘hike’. A ‘hike relative to what? In 2024 a doctor earns a monthly salary of 5,000 CUP (165 pesos per day/less than 20 dollars per month). A salary that does not cover the basics even after accessing the free and subsidised staples and shopping from acopia, for instance. As of summer 2024, a poor expresso coffee costs 20 pesod, a decent Americano coffee in a coffee shop costs 150 CUP. A 1-litre bottle of soya oil costs at least 800 pesos, one egg costs between 70 and 100 pesos.
“A particular disappointment has been the lack of any significant upturn in agricultural output, despite the distribution of land to private farmers and a series of measures designed to improve their incentives, distribution networks, supplies of inputs and the availability of finance.” (Morris, 2014) In fact, the state of the agricultural sector in 2024 is worse. That is reflected in all levels: scarcity, low quality, high cost and few varieties. A one or two visits to the Saturday weekly big market in Cienfuegos provides an accurate picture of the big problems facing agricultural production in Cuba. Furthermore, and as admitted by Cubans themselves, there is is one type of bread and it is of a low quality.
There is a big contrast with a country like Tunisia. Although the latter’s agricultural sector is not a strong one and the country’s GDP is smaller than Cuba’s, availability – and not necessarily affordability – of vegetables and fruits is far away better than in Cuba. Cuba enjoys roughly 60% of arable land. According to official figures, Cuban agricultural production fell 35 percent between 2019 and 2023.
In 2021, as reported by the Associated Press, the Cuban government “approved a package of 63 reforms meant to make it easier and more profitable for producers to get food to consumers — measures such as allowing farmers greater freedom to choose their crops and letting them sell more freely, at higher prices.” Yet the problem seems a chronic/structural one.
“Officials have eroded the dominance of state farms and encouraged more semi-independent cooperatives. They have given farmers greater land use rights and loosened restrictions on sales. But none of those efforts has yet been able to solve the island’s chronic agricultural woes.”
There are also climate factors that have always impacted the agricultural sector in Cuba. According to the World Food Program, “Cuba counts among the Caribbean countries most exposed to hurricanes, droughts and unseasonal rains— which will likely become more frequent and severe with climate change. Other likely impacts — rising sea levels and temperatures, and shrinking rainfall — affect agriculture, forestry and tourism, all pillars of the national economy.” To counter climate change impacts, the WFP set up a project in 2024 to support small farmers meet growing food demand.
Power outages
Among the solutions are “the controversial Turkish floating power plants that began to arrive in the country in 2019 and for which Cuba pays a monthly rent. The amount paid is not exactly known, although it is presumed to be high. However, the Cuban government has defended them as good business.
After the improvement experienced towards the end of last year and the beginning of 2023, when blackouts due to deficits in generation capacity even disappeared, the advance of the year has brought new breakdowns, prolonged maintenance and other tensions. Thus, power outages have once again become a daily reality in many parts of the island.
The problems in power generation in Cuba did not begin in 2021. The crisis that the electrical system has gone through in recent years is the result of a cumulative process of deterioration, delays and non-compliance with the required capital maintenance, punctual patching up instead of deep repairs, of decisions marked by presenteeism and spurred by crises and chronic shortages.
According to official data, 95% of the island's electricity is generated from fossil fuels, which also includes gas derived from the production of national crude oil. Renewable sources, on the other hand, barely add up to 5% of the total. As is known, Cuba must import an important part of the oil.
As is known, Cuba must import an important part of the oil. And while the prices of crude oil in the international market have been rising, the Cuban coffers have suffered the devastating effect of the economic crisis, the pandemic and the U.S. sanctions. And this has had a rebounding effect on power generation.
In 2019, the country spent between 150 and 170 million dollars to buy fuel; In 2021, spending amounted to 1.471 billion dollars and in 2022, 1.7 billion dollars were spent, at a time when there was no tourism or other sources of income,” the minister of energy and mines explained in February in this regard.
A lot of money. Money to gradually replace obsolete or damaged equipment, to give generating plants the capital maintenance they need instead of postponing them or doing express versions, to maintain the vitality of the system even if some of its largest blocks are out for months to undergo a capital repair.
According to De la O Levy, each year some 250 million dollars are needed to sustain the Cuban electrical system under normal conditions, without counting the expenses for the purchase of fuel.
The credit of 1.2 billion euros that Russia granted to Cuba more than seven years ago for the construction of thermoelectric plants is still pending.
In any case, the definitive solution to the island’s power shortages could be within reach and without the need to use oil. Renewable energies, such as solar energy — something that is never lacking in Cuba —, could well be the long-awaited remedy, as the authorities themselves have recognized. Although, at least for now, they are not cheap either.”
https://oncubanews.com/en/cuba/power-generation-in-cuba-is-there-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/
The irony and the ‘obsoleteness of the capitalist nation state’ as the New Scientist magazine once called it and the persistence of uneven and combined development, was again illustrated through an article on the BBC in June 2024 describing the ‘overproduction’ of electricity in Spain.
A month after I left Cuba, a grid failure caused four days of nationwide blackouts.
Cuba and international finance
“In 1993, Cuba invited an IMF official, Executive Director Jacques de Groote, to visit Havana for secret meetings with Castro and other senior officials. That led to a number of further contacts at a lower level and eventually to a request for technical assistance from the IMF. The Fund, bowing to opposition from the U.S., declined the request. There the matter has rested.”
Emily Morris: “In most of the ex-Comecon countries, export earnings had almost regained their 1990 level by 1993; in Cuba’s case, they were 79 per cent lower—down from $5.4bn to $1.2bn. Havana was also worse hit in terms of external financing. The severity of the shock was compounded by the sudden loss of external credit and lack of new sources of finance. While ‘transition’ countries enjoyed the support of the IMF, World Bank and EBRD [European Bank for Reconstruction and Development] to help with their post-Comecon adjustment, us sanctions meant there was no such assistance for Cuba. Total net official loans to ‘transition’ economies for 1991–96 amounted to $112 per capita, while for Cuba the figure was $26.(Morris, Unexpected Cuba, NLR, 88, 2014. See also OECD, Geographical Distribution of Financial Flows to Developing Countries, 1998)
“Cuba’s attempts to rebuild foreign-exchange earnings,” concludes Morris, “were obstructed by us sanctions, which blocked access not only to us markets but also to loans or development aid from most multi- lateral institutions, while making commercial finance expensive and difficult to secure. As a result, Cuba faced the harshest foreign-exchange constraints of any former Comecon country; this restricted investment and growth, and left the economy exceptionally vulnerable to changes in terms of trade or fluctuations in harvests.”
The Obama Administration “was on record as favouring the reintegration of Cuba into the world economy.”
“The 2015 Paris Club agreement forgave $8.5 billion of the $11.1 billion in sovereign debt Cuba defaulted on in 1986. Cuba agreed to repay the remainder in annual installments through 2033.”
In September 2023 Reuters estimated Cuba had failed “to pay the creditors more than $500 million as it struggled with shortages of food, medicine, fuel, and other basic goods amid rising social tensions.
Cuba, which last reported foreign debt of $19.7 billion for 2020, has restructured debt with Russia, China and some other creditors since then. The Caribbean island nation is not a member of the International Monetary Fund nor the World Bank.”
If it was or would be, Cuba would look like many poor countries that are still poor after decades of IMF and World Bank ‘neocolonial’ recipes of subjugation and multinational companies’ plunder of those countries in alliance with local ruling classes. (See Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, Debt, the IMF and The World Bank 2008)
Is allowing people to rent out rooms in their houses, or open small cafeterias and restaurants, or shops state capitalism as Pertierra calls it?
Tourism
“We cannot wait for the blockade to end to build the hotel plant,” the President Díaz-Canel justified then, who trusted that the sector would become the “locomotive of the national economy”.
The shift to tourism has made services the main sector of the Cuban economy today and Cuba an import dependent country. Due to the crisis and the pandemic, tourism has not recovered. The shortage of fuel and the frequent power outages have brought it to a standstill. Here is a snapshot from Cienfuegos city (the ‘Pearl of the south’ as it is called):
On the 1st day of June I went to inquire about excursions in Cienfuegos. At an agency on El Prado a woman told me that they did not have any organised excursions due to lack of ‘combustible’ (fuel). I went to the other agency on Boulevard San Fernando, but I found it had closed down a while ago. Hotels and restaurants in the city are almost empty and casas particulares are desperate for customers.
Social differentiation
What Morris estimated in 2014 was more or less the case in 2024: “Probably more than half the population—are those who manage to get by because they can supplement their state incomes in some way, but live hand-to-mouth and don’t have enough to save. Government officials are in this category, which also includes those living off modest remittances or engaged in small private activity, legal or illegal.”
Some key points:
The current Cuban Communist Party was created six years after the revolution. Castro was not a ‘communist’ before the revolution.
Cuba, first and foremost, was pushed into the Soviet camp because of economic reasons. Then because of the threat of invasion by the US.
Installing nuclear warheads by the Soviet leadership was Moscow’s idea, not Havana’s. Castro “had not asked for the missiles to be placed in Cuba. No one requested his permission when they were removed.”
Cubans tend to forget that Cuba has a tumultuous and violent history, and the last 70 years has seen a relative peace. During the first quarter of the twenty-first century countries a few countries in Latin America, Honduras, Venezuela, Haiti, El Salvador, Bolivia … have experienced instability and violence. More countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East should envy Cuba.
“Revolution is strong medicine,” Jean Paul Sartre wrote in his book, published in English the following year as Sartre on Cuba. He described what he had seen and gave it his uncompromising approval:
“A society breaks its bones with hammer blows, demolishes its structures,
overthrows its institutions, transforms the regime of property and redistributes its wealth, orients its production along other principles, attempts to increase its rate of growth as rapidly as possible, and, in the very moment of most radical destruction, seeks to reconstruct, to give itself by bone grafts a new skeleton. The remedy is extreme; it is often necessary to impose it by violence.”
Sartre could not say the same thing about the Palestinian revolutionary movement.
C. Wright Mills wrote in 1960: “I mean this in two senses: first, in the ordinary sense of an absence of enough people with skill and knowledge and sensibility; but secondly, I am referring to this absence combined with the felt menace of counterrevolution and with the fact of a generally uneducated population. This combination could lead to the easy way out: the absolute control of all means of expression and the laying down of a Line to be followed.”
Cuba in 2024 is not characterised by ‘the absolute control of al the means of expression’. A few people talked to me openly about their dissatisfaction and who is to blame. Others, the defenders of the regime, blame the America embargo. TV programmes are rife with the Western bourgeois culture (see Havana and Cienfuegos pages). Along the personality cult, for example, there is diversity of programmes. A a private bookshop in Cienfuegos, for example displays George Orwell’s 1984 where a state library makes available a very limited number of titles. Few people get access to Netflix, but the Internet is widely open albeit a few sites are blocked. One cannot speak of ‘absolute control’. Cuba is not North Korea.
‘Uneven and combined development’
In a simple illustration, the latest brand of trainers on a filthy and broken pavement, an electric scooter passing by old crumbling houses and buildings and by a heap stinking rubbish in and outside a broken rubbish bin and has been there for a month at least, a restaurant with very nice tables and chairs and a digital menu only, but a very poor or no salad because of poor agricultural production, on the top of a blown up sewer runs a shiny double decker bus for 10/20 tourists, next to it a big blue bus packed with Cubans in a stifling heat, a middle-aged man with an unhealthy diet reflected in his huge belly wearing an apple watch a gift from his son in the U.S., a bar with two big screens, the latest clips, well-decorated and a queue of people holding ration cards to get subsidised or free but poor quality rice, a luxurious hotel with the a state of the art air-conditioning and comfort and a man on a pavement assembling parts of a very old electric fan, the construction of a new and the tallest hotel in Havana is being completed while a man sitting on the pavement trying to sell a pair of women sandals…
All reminded me of this passage in The History of the Russian Revolution: “The privilege of historic [firstly and primarily economic] backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages.” (Leon Trotsky, Pluto Press edition, 1977).
The main investors in Cuba, generally via joint venture with Cuban state enterprises, are Spain, Canada, Venezuela, Italy and France. Venezuela has made a number of strategic investments in the field of exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons in the form of joint ventures and mutual investments.
Cuba has 334 businesses with foreign direct investment, of which 56 have 100% foreign capital, according to the Ministry of Foreign Trade. During 2023, 30 new foreign capital projects were approved—eight fewer than in 2018, the year with the highest number of foreign investments—and tourism is the main sector where foreign entrepreneurs have chosen to invest.
According to Word Food Program, “the Government's monthly food basket provides basic commodities for the entire population. However, in 2023 it was almost entirely imported, and the Government reported shortages and delays in distribution.
Pre-pandemic data from the National Institute of Hygiene, Epidemiology and Microbiology showed a high prevalence of anaemia in children aged 6-23 months in eastern and central provinces and Havana.
Cuba is one of the Caribbean countries most exposed to hurricanes, droughts and unseasonal rains. In addition, low agricultural productivity and high post-harvest losses remain key challenges.
“With few vegetables consumed and low food diversity, the diet of the average Cuban family is poor in micronutrients, says the WFP. “Cuba imports 70 to 80 percent of its domestic food requirements, with most imports slated for social protection programs.”
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