Cuba will seek to attract foreign investment to revive its decaying industrial sector through the IV Cubaindustria international convention, which will be held from June 17 to 21, its organizers reported this Tuesday.
The event will be attended by more than a hundred participants from 22 different countries, including Spain, Russia, China and Türkiye.
This edition, the first since 2018, will be held despite the “complex scenario” of the Cuban economy, still diminished four years after the covid-19 pandemic, as highlighted in a press conference. Ernesto Cedeno RodríguezVice Minister of Industries.
In March of this year, the island also held the XXV edition of the International Agroindustrial Food Fair with the same objective: to seek outside investors to amend the sector.
35 companies from countries such as Russia, Spain, Brazil, Canada, China and Argentina participated in that meeting, as well as a hundred national private and state firms.
The Caribbean country suffers from a Chronic shortages for decadeswhere shortages of basic foods such as powdered milk, eggs, oil, bread, wheat flour and chicken, among others, are common.
Cuba imports 80% of the food you consumeaccording to the United Nations.
The regime claims that it spends more than $2 billion a year bringing from abroad the heavily subsidized products that it delivers through the supply book (ration card).
The scarcity, inflation and peso depreciation have put a dent in the purchasing power of Cubans.
The country’s own leader, the dictator Miguel Diaz-Canelstated in March at a meeting at the Ministry of the Food Industry that families spend “more than 70%” of their income on buying food.
Cuba will delay at least until 2025 the population census that it had planned to carry out two years ago due to lack of resources, a consequence of the serious economic crisis that the country is suffering.
This is how he advances it in an interview with EFE the vice head of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), Juan Carlos Alfonsowho recognizes the detriment of the situation in his department, although he defends that the system has “very strong records.”
Alfonso also confirms the deterioration of well-being indicators, places the island in an intermediate position in Latin America in this area, and justifies – for political reasons – that the ONEI produces statistics that are not published, such as migration estimates and inequality indicators.
The delay of the large macro population survey that Cuba carries out every ten years affects the data available to the regime to prepare public policies and also its major accounts. Alfonso alleges that it is due to the “external aggressions” suffered by the country, in relation to US sanctions and also to “internal problems”.
“There is an increase in situations of vulnerability, of inequality, there is not the slightest doubt about that”says.
In this sense, he recognizes that “it has deteriorated” andl Multidimensional Poverty Index (IPM), an indicator designed by the UN that includes education, health, and standard of living (and not just income level), and which is, Alfonso argues, the one that best reflects the situation in Cuba, where many public services are free and universal.
(With information from EFE)
