Cuban President Raul Castro turned 80 on Friday, vowing to rejuvenate the country's aging leadership and its sagging economy.
The National Ballet of Cuba plans to deliver a “message of peace” when it starts its first United States tour in eight years, said renowned director, Alicia Alonso. The visit is expected to last one month.
President Raul Castro said that Cuba currently “needs more than ever the blessings from its evangelic churches” to keep advancing with the reforms to update the exhausted economic model of the last fifty years, according to reports in the official Havana media.
The number of Cubans working in the private sector continues to rise and now includes over 300,000 as a result of President Raul Castro government’s economic reforms that have been implemented since last October.
Lawmakers from the European Union and Latin America meeting in Uruguay approved two resolutions on the lack of freedoms in Cuba and on the coming electoral process in Venezuela.
Cuba has given all small businesses the authority to hire (and fire) labour and will loosen other regulations governing private enterprise as part of the broader measures to reform the island’s economy and boost production, the government said in a statement.
Cuban blacks and mulattos will suffer the most with the elimination of a million government jobs, which could easily become a racial problem, consequence of the radical reforms imposed, and ‘must be addressed as a priority’, points out a report from Cuban academic Esteban Morales.
Cuban government companies and cooperatives repeatedly “inefficient” (non profitable) will be handed to the private sector or liquidated, according to the reforms program approved by the island’s VI Communist Party congress and which was officially published Monday.
Cuba hopes to counter US worries over its plans to start its first full-scale offshore oil exploration in a rare presentation this week to an energy audience outside the island.
The Cuban government said Monday that it plans to study ways to allow residents of the island to travel abroad as tourists, suggesting it will ease the bureaucratic hurdles and outright restrictions that prevent many residents from leaving.