The Cuban economy’s 4 per cent growth is the first encouraging result after the approval in 2011 of the process of transformations of the country’s economic model.

This year the Cuban economy grew 4 per cent as a first visible reaction to the measures adopted by the government since the start of the process of transformations called the Updating of the Economic Model. The advance, reported inmid-December at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, contrasts with the meagre gross domestic product (GDP) growths of previous years, and which had its worst moment in 2014 with a 1 per cent increase.

The Paris Club exempted the Cuban government from the payment of the millions of dollars in accumulated interests for an outstanding debt since the 1980s.

In an arrangement defined as historic, the Paris Club accepted to write off a substantial part of the debt of more than 11 billion dollars Cuba has owed the members of this group of creditor countries and refinance the rest of the debts. The news, announced on December 14, puts an end to the negotiations both sides had been maintaining to settle a standstill in payments of almost three decades.

Cuban banks are reviewing their credit activity for state and non-state agricultural and livestock producers.

Cuban banking ratified its objective of consolidating or expanding offers to the agricultural and livestock sector, where the non-state sector of the economy is concentrated, the one with which it has negotiated the best until now. The principal banking institutions are promoting attractive interest rates and other options to expand the credit activity and back food production in the country, defined by the government as a matter of national security.

The 2015-2016 sugar harvest is beginning this week, with sugarcane plantations pressured by the drought.

Cuban sugar mills are again staring up this week in a harvest foreseen as tense by the shadow of the drought and the traditional conflicts with resources. Recent reports indicate that fewer factories will start grinding before the close of December compared to the previous year.