In the midst of the sustained decline of the sector, the IV International Convention and Exhibition of Cuban Industry CubaIndustria 2024 was inaugurated today in Havana, under the motto “For greater complementarity, integration and international insertion for industrial development”, which leaves clear the The regime’s strategy of appealing to foreign investment as the only alternative to recover industrial production that has been going to the bottom for years.
In this sense, the Cuban News Agency (ACN) reported that the main topics of the event are recycling, metallurgy, iron and steel, containers and packaging, quality management and environmental protection, electronics and automation, fashion, furniture, air conditioning and refrigeration, that is, all the national industry sectorsdue to the poor condition of each of them.
According to Ernesto Cedeño Rodríguez, vice minister of Industries and executive vice president of the Organizing Committee, CubaIndustria 2024 will have 1,265 participants, including Cubans and those from 25 other nations.where Venezuela, Spain, France, Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Namibia, Vietnam and China stand out.
According to Edismar Saavedra Yero, vice president of the Scientific Convention, who aims to seek theoretical solutions to such an adverse outlook927 national and foreign delegates will participate, who will make available more than 300 presentations and 62 keynote conferences.
In statements to ACN, Cedeño Rodríguez said that “the main purpose of the event is to join forces and strengthen alliances between the Cuban business community, including non-state forms of management, and the foreign business community, accompanied by universities and research centers,” which that reinforces the regime’s will to bet on foreign and private investments to revive the sector.
The event, in which its organizers intend to sign 26 legal documents, including letters of intent, memorandums of understanding, agreements and commercial alliances, will be marked by the strong presence of Chinese and Russian businessmen, the main allies of Havana in this area, in addition to the prominence of the Union of Military Industries, the National Center for Containers and Packaging, and the institutions with productive chains.
In CubaIndustria 2024 “the potential of the Cuban industry will be made visible with products and services that are sustainable from a financial point of view, to satisfy the needs of the economy and exports,” said the minister of the sector Eloy Álvarez Martínez, which demonstrates the the regime’s obsession with exporting without first resolving serious internal problems.
The inauguration of CubaIndustria 2024 was attended by the nonagenarian Cuban Vice Prime Minister Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, the First Deputy Minister of Industry and Commerce of the Russian Federation, Osmakov Vasili Serguevish, and the Venezuelan Minister of the sector, José Félix Rivas Alvarado, as well as representatives of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the World Packaging Organization.
The Cuban industry is inefficient for decadesbut in recent years production has suffered even more, mainly due to the obsolescence of machinery, the energy and fuel crisis that causes stoppages or closures of industries and the low profitability that, based on deficient economic measures , the country’s authorities have achieved for a key sector in development.
According to an article on the subject by analyst Rafaela Cruz, published by DIARIO DE CUBA, “from 2018 to 2021 the remuneration of workers in the sector fell by 25%, which may be behind the industrial percentage within the total labor force of the country would be reduced, “with the production of intermediate goods plummeting by 20% and that of final goods by 16%.”
In 2023, the then Minister of Economy Alejandro Gil Fernández asked himself, “what is the (industrial) potential and how to exploit it?” and said that “We cannot have the Cuban industry idle with the high rates of unsatisfied demand that exist in the country.” A year later, not only has he disappeared from his position, the plans to avoid having an “idle Cuban industry” have also disappeared.
