Warning: You may feel some things are surrealistic, improbable, or absurd but all is true. Remember, Cuba is under the control of a totalitarian state with the only objective of keeping the power at any cost. This report will show you the actual situation in Cuba, that one that the state propaganda tries to deny.
A few things have changed since the last post. The Deputy Prime Minister and head of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment of Cuba, Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz, received the Director General of the Thai International Cooperation Agency (TICA, for its acronym in English). However, the sustained exchanges did not result in any tangible agreement.
Cuba began a working session in Havana with senior representatives of the Paris Club with the aim of renegotiating the debt acquired with this group. Despite the complex economic and financial situation that the island is going through, which honestly lasts decades, the Cuban government expressed its willingness to honor the commitments assumed.
After the Cuban delegation blamed almost all the country's economic difficulties on the United States embargo, the Paris Club envoys gathered as much information as possible and proposed establishing a new calendar in accordance with Cuba's ability to pay, seeking to guarantee debt collection. It should be noted that the Paris Club also has investments in the Cuban biotechnology and transportation sectors.
According to the latest Paris Club report with data up to December 2022, a reduction in the nominal value of the Cuban debt can be observed in 2021 and 2022. However, this could be due to variations in exchange rates because the debt is denominated in various currencies.
In 2014, the country already achieved a cancellation of 90% of the debt with Russia which amounted to more than 30 billion only with that country. In addition, in 2015 it achieved a reduction in the amount to be paid, a grace period without interest and rescheduling the payment schedule with the Club de Paris itself. Although the 2015 agreement has been modified promptly, obtaining new payment deferrals, but maintaining the value of the debt. In other words, there have been very different arrangements from the 2015 agreement that included partial debt forgiveness (8.5 billion).
Cuba's current debt with the group is 4.827 billion dollars, but the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) analysis entity in its report for the first quarter of 2023 estimated a total debt (public + private) of 27.2 billion dollars in 2022, means that the debt with the Paris Club is slightly less than 18 % of the total country debt. We will have to wait for the results obtained from this negotiation and for the data to be made public. Secrecy is one of the main weapons of corruption in the Cuban government.
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The value of 1 dollar is 220 Cuban pesos. Now the Cuba minimum pension is around 6.86 USD, the minimum wage is 9.54 USD and the average salary is 19.13 dollars; all amounts are on a monthly basis.
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Photo of a queue to buy fuel taken by me
Fuel shortages are evident in images like this. Queues that last for days and reach a length of more than 1 km. This causes a direct increase in the price of private transportation that moves the majority of people in the country.
Lack of medicines, high cost of food, and political repression are the constant in Cuba.
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Two young men were victims of a “scam”, apparently they were hired by a person in Russia to work in construction fixing the houses devastated by the war, trenches, rubble, etc and their flights were pay to travel to Moscow but all was a deception. The contract that they signed was for join to the Russian army and they were sent to military training. Now family members say that they don't know where they are and haven't known of them for a week.
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The US airline JetBlue will suspend all connections to the island on September 17, due to changes in the regulatory landscape and restrictions on the ability of their clients to enter Cuba. The airline was the first to operate a commercial flight between the two countries in 2016 after more than 50 years of bans on this kind of flight to Cuba from the US.
The truth is that since 2022, there have been several cases of Cubans residing on the island who have been prevented from flying to the country. The regime has notified airlines such as American Airlines and Southwest that some citizens cannot enter, as was the case of the activists Anamely Ramos and Omara Ruiz Urquiola, who were not allowed to board their return flights.
Instead, tourism to the island has not been able to recover after the pandemic either, and American travelers have opted for other destinations in the area, such as Cancun, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, due to the economic crisis that is plaguing Cuba, the high prices of their packages tourism and problems in basic infrastructure such as roads, shops, and internet connectivity.
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Félix Navarro, a political prisoner, denounces from prison the lack of medical attention to Jorge Manuel Lopez, another political prisoner, despite suffering severe pain.
Link to audio -
https://twitter.com/observacuba/status/1697319616190538194
- observacuba
This is all for today Cuba: Inside View Report, thanks for reading and remember that you can check the other reports here:
