The new forms of business organisation are growing moderately after the boost they got in the first two years.

Cooperatives continue growing in the non-agricultural sector of the Cuban economy, though at a slower pace than at the start. After giving them the green light in November 2012 for their incorporation to economic activities where they previously did not exist, the government is cautiously manoeuvring before favouring the expansion of this form of non-state work. This year, however, they are tending to gain force, coinciding with some measures approved to back them.

Financial restrictions and fuel import problems have greatly slowed down the economy more than expected. The memory of darker periods returns.

Storm clouds are again piling up over Cuba’s economy. The government is taking urgent measures, some linked to power cuts, which accentuate the memory of the dramatic times of the so-called Special Period. The affinity of some causes in time going into trances among each other does the rest. But President Raúl Castro does not admit comparisons with the crisis of those years. And present official policies are certainly different from those in the 1990s.

First the drought and later untimely rains reduced by a fifth the production of the 2015-2016 sugar harvest.

Adverse weather conditions, combined with industrial faults imposed a strong low in the 2015-2016 sugar harvest. Recent reports by the Azcuba Business Group indicate that it had barely reached 80 per cent of what it had planned. The emergency measures taken during the final stretch of the harvest and the government statement that it would not accept less tons than the previewed were of little use.

A phenomenon that cannot be underestimated as a rule.

Ever since the Countess of Merlin in the 19th century and that “avant la lettre” feminist that was Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Cuban women writers are a very important part of the canon of national literature which for a long time was ignored and underestimated.