Farmers are predicting bumper crops of sweet potato, plantain, malanga, cucumber, squash and other produce at a time when tons of those and other vegetables are rotting in the sun because there are no means to transport them to the cities, the newspaper Rebel Youth reported Sunday. At a state-run collection center in Güira de Melena, Havana province, reporters for the newspaper photographed about 500,000 pounds of produce that, according to administrators, could not be distributed to wholesalers and would likely spoil in the open air. (See photo above.)
A farmers' cooperative from that city has filed a 146,343-peso lawsuit against the collection agency, Acopio, for the loss of 261,000 pounds of tomatoes that were not picked up on time. Because of inefficient or unavailable methods of distribution, "hundreds of tons of tomato rotted in the loading bays of several establishments in the country," the article said.
The newspaper quotes a farmer as saying: "It is very sad to learn that you sweated for nothing, all the more when you were answering to a call [...] to produce more after the ravages caused by the hurricanes. If those [vegetables] were not needed, it wouldn't hurt so much, but the fact is that Cuba is buying food abroad at extremely high prices.
"Now they tell us there is no transportation and that [Havana City] is overstocked with food. Are the city folks the only ones who eat? Other provinces need the stuff that's being wasted away here." To read the entire article, in Spanish, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
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Russia praises Cuba for atomic research
An update on Russian-Cuban cooperation on nuclear power generation (see our May 27 blog item on the subject).
The Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's leading atomic research center, will "increase exchanges of mutual interest with the Cuban research center," Cuba's Radio Agramonte reported. Its director, Mikhail Kobalchuk, on Saturday welcomed Cuba's top nuclear specialist, Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, and Cuban Ambassador Juan Valdés, "to whom he praised the island's advances in the assimilation and development of leading technology," Radio Agramonte said.
According to an announcement, Castro toured the Institute's nanotechnology lab because "he has been entrusted by his government to carry out a national program for the development of this very new branch of science."
Nanotechnology is defined as the science of building functional systems at the molecular scale.
Kobalchuk congratulated Castro for the honorary doctorate he received this week at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and for the Igor Kurchatov Award he received from Russia's nuclear agency, Rosatom. Named after Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (1903-1960), the father of Soviet nuclear physics and chief of the Soviet atomic weapons program, the award is the highest honor conferred by Rosatom.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Texas port in talks to expand trade
A delegation of Port of Corpus Christi officials will travel to Havana next week to establish regular vessel service to Cuba, in anticipation of a normalization of relations between the two countries. According to The Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the discussion will be about triangular trade, a concept that takes U.S. products from Texas to Cuba, picks up Cuban products and delivers them to some other country (primarily Mexico) in the Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean Sea and brings products from that country back to Texas.
The Port of Corpus Christi and the Port of Havana "have established a relation that is not fleeting," said Port chairman Rubén Bonilla. "It is a permanent bond that can only help our community's economic growth." Corpus Christi signed a memorandum of understanding with Cuba in 2003.
Currently, Texas exports about $90 million worth of agricultural products to Cuba. In a recent editorial, The Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise said that amount "could easily and substantially be increased with open trade, especially with the rice grown in our region" and urged President Obama to lift the embargo.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Fewer Russians vacationing in Cuba
The number of Russian tourists flying to Cuba for solntsye i razvlechenye (that's sun and fun to us) declined 10.9 percent in the first four months of the year, according to the Russian travel magazine Aviaport. From January to April, 13,636 Russians arrived in the island, down from 15,307 in the same period last year. The magazine blamed the drop on the worldwide economic crisis and the high cost of air fare between Moscow and Havana.
Despite that decline, the flow of turisti from other countries increased, the magazine says, citing Cuban sources. In four months, they totaled 1.04 million, a 2 percent increase over last year (1.03 million). Canada was the most generous country of origin, sending 512,000 Canadians, 10 percent over last year's figure.
Other increases: 8,000 Czechs, or 34 percent more than last year; 40,700 Spaniards (+3.3 percent); 23,100 Argentines (+2.5 percent). One significant decrease: 56,500 Brits, a 17.7 percent drop from last year.
Cuban authorities are optimistic that, despite the global money crunch, at least 2.5 million tourists will descend on the island this year, Aviaport says. Last year, 40,600 of them were Russian. To read the article, in Russian, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Russia, Cuba to resume nuclear research
Russia and Cuba have agreed to renew their cooperation in nuclear research, interrupted in 1992 when construction of a nuclear power plant in Cienfuegos province was halted, the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti reported Wednesday. No further details were given.
Sergei Kirienko, president of the state-owned Rosatom, announced the plan during a ceremony Wednesday at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute at which Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, scientific advisor to Cuba's Council of State, was presented with an award for his work in nuclear research. Castro Díaz-Balart, 59, is the Cuban leader's oldest son. He studied in the Soviet Union and graduated in theoretical physics. In the 1980s, he headed the Cuban agency in charge of nuclear physics studies.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Dissident: Castros 'don't want change'
Former government economist -- now pro-American dissident -- Oscar Espinosa Chepe is the subject of an article in Barron's magazine this week. What he says about Fidel Castro is not flattering. Some of his comments:
• "Fidel Castro is just an enormous ego. He sees communism not as a movement to aspire to, but as a great tool to accomplish what he wanted to achieve, which is everlasting power and, if possible, to rule the world. He isn't ideological -- he just wants the power."
• In the 1970s, "Castro said we would go beyond capitalism, and we did, but we went in the wrong direction. What we got was much worse."
• "The Castro regime is Taliban-like in its thinking. They don't want change. Like the Taliban, they know that if they change anything, it will lead to political change, and they are scared of that."
• "Castro is so worried about Obama. For so many years they have had this enemy, America. Castro has been able to tell the people that American Marines will come to the island and kill them all. This lie won't work anymore. Obama could mean the end for Castro."
For a close look at an outspoken naysayer, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Cuba hails resumption of migration talks
Washington's offer to Cuba to resume talks on migration "will be examined with the greatest interest," said National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón on Monday. "We have always said that we are willing to sit down to talk with them under conditions of equality, and on migratory matters we had an experience that was abruptly interrupted" by the Bush administration, Alarcón said, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.
"Now, all of a sudden, comes this proposal, which, I am sure, will be examined with the greatest interest," he said, adding that, between 1994 and 2003, "such meetings were held regularly, twice a year, until the United States unilaterally suspended them." Alarcón, who often was the Cuban interlocutor at those meetings, said that now that the Americans "retook the initiative of resuming them, it has to be considered, has to be studied."
Speaking at a poetry conference in Havana, Alarcón said Barack Obama "has done what he promised" about Cuba during his presidential campaign -- he relaxed the restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba by Cuban-Americans. "There is a change" in Washington, and Cubans have "to appreciate it and handle it in an adequate manner," he said.
Last Friday, the State Department said it had proposed restarting the talks to "reaffirm both sides' commitment to safe, legal and orderly migration, to review trends in illegal Cuban migration to the United States and to improve operational relations with Cuba on migration issues."
President Obama "wants to ensure that we are doing all we can to support the Cuban people in fulfilling their desire to live in freedom," Darla Jordan, a department spokeswoman, said at the time. "He will continue to make policy decisions accordingly."
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
Spanish PM: Cuba must reciprocate
Using an expression applicable to a game of dominoes or checkers -- even poker -- Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said it is Cuba's turn to reciprocate Washington's gestures of engagement. Now that President Obama has relaxed controls on travel and remittances for Cuban-Americans, it is Cuba's "turn to move a chip," Zapatero told the Spanish newspaper Público on Sunday.
Zapatero's references to Cuba took up a tiny segment of a long interview on Spanish and world topics, but they merit translation here:
"Q.: What is Obama’s interest in Cuba focused on?
"A.: He wants to solve the problem, put an end to the isolation. He has adopted positive measures regarding travel, venues for dialogue, and that coincides with the process begun by the European Union.
"Q.: So now it's Cuba who has to move a chip?
"A.: It's its turn to move a chip. We have to nurture that expectation. The United States appears to be committed. Some days ago, Hillary Clinton herself acknowledged the failure of the United States' policy toward Cuba. Now, the Cuban government has to make reforms and, in my opinion, they must begin in the economic and social spheres."
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
A call to Cubans: Save resources or die
Cuba's economic motto should be "Savings or death," a variation on the revolutionary slogan "Motherland or death," the Communist Party daily Granma proposed Friday.
In an article remarkable for its almost-feverish urgency, the newspaper's editor, Lázaro Barredo, contends that Cuba's economic problems are grave and need to be addressed at once. He quotes Fidel Castro as saying that "savings are the most immediate hard-currency income our country can ever have."
"Along with savings, efficiency," Barredo says, asking workers and leaders to "save, produce with greater output, and render services that, though modest, may satisfy people." Cuba needs to reduce its expenses "so that we do not mortgage ourselves," he writes. Cubans must "avoid the squandering of resources, [...] reject the tendency to hoard them and [...] find formulas for the boosting of productivity."
If this is done, workers "will be remunerated in relation to their actual contribution."
Workers must "'squeeze the juice' out of machines and investments, because it is not possible to sustain the imbalance in foreign trade for the first quarter of this year, when imports accounted for 78 percent and exports for 22," the editor says.
"The country does not need bureaucrats or technocrats; it needs administrators" who can ensure "that the money and resources the state has placed in their hands are used efficiently," Barredo writes. And he closes with an injunction that has been used many times in the past by Cuba's leaders: "We need to tighten our belts." To read the article, in Spanish, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.
