All the manuals, even the most arduous treaties on aesthetics, establish the relativity of concepts like beauty or ugliness. An entire series of cultural, historic, climate, ethnic actors have an influence when the time comes for a defined human group to consider that a certain object is beautiful or not, or even a person with specific features and physiognomies. What’s important then is that within a given context the harmony that is considered a representation of beauty, or the lack of that harmony that decrees the ugliness of the judged, function according to the cultural tradition that differentiates or defines that social group, the heir and generator of those concepts (material and spiritual) and capable, as a social entity, of classifying and assessing its appreciations.
The number of self-employed has grown to 400,000, in a process of integration to the Cuban economy not exempt from conflicts.
The self-employment option continues attracting more persons, at a slightly higher pace this year, though they continue viewing with apathy the offer of bank credits. According to the most recent report by the Labour and Social Security Ministry (MTSS), at the close of last July there were 436,342 self-employed persons.
Faced by the threat of frustration over finding new oil deposits, Cuba has speeded up investments to obtain electricity through renewable energy sources.
Two major investments in the fields of wind power and solar energy have confirmed this year the policy of reducing the dependence on imported oil, still too much of a burden for the Cuban economy. For years this country has been buying around half of the eight million tons of oil and equivalent gas consumed by its industry, agriculture and the residential sector. Offshore explorations, financed by foreign firms through risk contracts, have not discovered new deposits.
According to official data, the average wage in Cuba is slowly increasing. Most interesting is the results by territory behind these numbers and the studies undertaken about consumer spending.
In the last two decades, wages have unleashed in Cuba multiple tensions in Cubans homes and interpretations, controversies and all types of confusions among economists, sociologists and other doubtful experts. The umbrella of monetary duality and exchange rates rarefies any estimate. Even so, a few days ago the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) risked presenting a report regarding this.
