Caribbean & Central America - December 2014 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The two day visit to Cuba by Spain's foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, in late November was the first by a minister from the conservative government led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, of the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), which has long been very critical of the Communist Cuban government.

Following a meeting on 25 November with Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez and Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel, García-Margallo called for an acceleration of the tentative economic ‘updating’ launched by President Raúl Castro in 2010 in a bid to overhaul the bloated, inefficient and increasingly cash-strapped state. The process, which included limited liberalisation to allow a small domestic private sector to begin to operate, has been very stop-start, however, with mixed results to date and a sense of mounting frustration at the government’s reluctance to go a bit deeper, a bit faster. The Cuban government argues that it needs to keep control over the process so as to guarantee the social achievements of the Revolution and to protect citizens from the vagaries of a ‘market’ economy. Cubans themselves are chomping at the bit for a bit more market and a bit less state.

Foreign investors, meanwhile, just want clear and stable operating rules. "Spain would like to see a more rapid pace to the economic reforms that give more space for private initiative and foreign investment ... which advance monetary unification and allow for decentralization," García-Margallo stated. Spain is Cuba's third largest trading partner and the largest European investor in the country. Cuba is currently in talks with the European Union (EU) on a bilateral agreement on Political Dialogue and Cooperation. Under the PP government led by José Maria Aznar (1996-2004), Spain was the architect of the EU Common Position on Cuba (1996), which, in response to the Cuban shoot-down of two planes linked to a Miami-based Cuban-American exile group, conditioned political and economic relations on democracy in Cuba, a position the Havana government has vehemently rejected ever since. The expectation is that the Political Dialogue and Cooperation agreement, due to be inked in 2015, will effectively supercede, finally, the Common Position, which some European countries argue is counterproductive to the efforts to support Cuba in its reform push.

On the political front, García-Margallo told reporters that he had asked the Castro government to grant travel rights to Cuban dissidents freed from prison in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, following hunger strikes and some unrest, the former Socialist government in Spain mediated talks between the Cuban Catholic Church and the Cuban government to secure the release of 75 political opponents arrested in the ‘Black Spring’ of 2003 and sentenced to jail terms of 6-28 years. Of the 75, 63 agreed to permanent exile; 12 refused that condition. Under the conditions of their eventual release, they are not allowed to leave the country. Cuba since then has relaxed its travel and migration rules to give much more flexibility to ordinary Cubans wanting to go in and out of the country on a temporary basis. García-Margallo said he had requested that the exiles (many of them in Spain) be allowed to return and the local dissidents be allowed to travel if they wished.

Finally, García-Margallo said that he had urged President Castro to attend the upcoming Ibero-American Summit, to be held in Veracruz, Mexico, on 8-9 December. In recent years, the summit, meant to act as bridge between Spain and Portugal and their former colonies, has lost weight, with the likes of Brazil staying away in favour of newer regional talking shops like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which groups all countries in the Western Hemisphere bar the US and Canada.

• Latest economic forecasts

Cuba’s economy minister Marino Murillo has cut the official GDP forecast for this year to 1.3%, from 2.2% set a year ago, but said he expected a rebound to 4% in 2015, on stronger growth in the manufacturing, construction, agricultural and forestry sectors. He made no mention of the economic crisis in Venezuela, which supplies Cuba with oil, but stressed that energy supplies would be “adequate”. Cuba will spend US$2.2bn on food imports next year, up US$137m over this year, he added.