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.
The recent reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States has given rise to a series of historic remembrances in the press of both countries and a name that seemed totally buried in oblivion has reappeared once and again: that of Dr. Ernesto Dihigo y LópezTrigo (Havana, 1896- Miami, 1991), the island’s first ambassador in the United States after the triumph of the Revolution and the only one to have that condition until the appointment last summer of José R. Cabañas, given the time lapse of more than half a century of interrupted ties.
A year since the announcement of the start of the process for the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between Cuba and the United States, for many it seems (it seems to me) that the concrete advances achieved are below the expectations and needs of the countries and, above all, of the Cuban population, which has barely received the practical benefits of the new political relations with the northern neighbour.
