Tag: Raúl Castro

• Monday, April 18th 2011 - 06:38 UTC

  Cuba’s geriatric leadership admits it lacks a reserve of well-trained replacement

  

  Cuba will consider placing term limits on its leaders to assure new blood in the government, President Raul Castro said in a speech kicking off a Communist Party congress on the island he and his brother have led for more than five decades.

• Saturday, March 12th 2011 - 23:04 UTC

  Cuban regime frees leading dissident who promises to keep protesting

  

  The Cuban government has freed one of the country's leading dissidents, but he says he will keep protesting against the government.

• Thursday, March 10th 2011 - 22:35 UTC

  Petrobras abandons oil exploration in Cuba; all eyes set on Repsol-YPF

  

  Brazilian oil giant Petrobras has withdrawn from an offshore oil exploration block in Cuba's waters that it leased amid great fanfare in 2008, a Brazilian official said on Thursday, citing poor prospects.

• Wednesday, March 2nd 2011 - 07:00 UTC

  Cuban reforms delayed: who and how do you sacks half a million state workers?

  

  Cuba's plans to lay off half a million state workers by the end of March are behind schedule, President Raul Castro has acknowledged. Castro, quoted by state television, said the timetable for the cuts would be altered to soften their impact.

• Wednesday, February 2nd 2011 - 14:30 UTC

  Castro tells bureaucrats to end waste, improvisation and listen to people’s concerns

  

  President Raul Castro called on the Cuban government to eliminate waste and provide more efficient and improved quality services while keeping “feet and ears on the ground” to closely listen to Cubans concerns regarding the economic reforms recently put into practice.

• Thursday, January 6th 2011 - 23:14 UTC

  Cuba: Massive cruise liner docks in La Havanna to much fanfare

  

  A salsa band, dancing schoolchildren and showgirls in bikini tops and feather headdresses welcomed some 1,500 tourists on a British cruise liner that officials described as among the biggest ships to visit Cuba in years.

• Thursday, January 6th 2011 - 12:56 UTC

  Cuban trade unions “guarantors” of the elimination of 500.000 state jobs

  

  Layoffs planned to eliminate some 500,000 state jobs in Cuba this year got underway this week, according to the island’s only legal workers’ organization. The official weekly Trabajadores cited a speech by CTC chief Salvador Valdes in the eastern province of Holguin, in which he said it was the union’s responsibility to “be the guarantor” of the process of labour reorganization.

• Thursday, January 6th 2011 - 11:48 UTC

  Cuban reforms on the move: soap and toothpaste eliminated from monthly ration

  

  Cuba’s government, trying to save money and eliminate subsidies announced this week it will remove soap, toothpaste and detergent from the monthly ration of food and consumer products it has handed out since the early days of the Cuban revolution.

• Monday, December 20th 2010 - 05:45 UTC

  “Too much secrecy, too many lies” have taken the revolution to a critical situation

  

  In a dramatic speech to the National Assembly Cuba’s Raul Castro said he wasn’t elected to restore capitalism nor to surrender Socialism but admitted that “too much secrecy and too many lies” had taken the revolution to a critical situation: “either we rectify or we will plunge from the cliff and the efforts of entire generations would be lost”.

• Friday, December 3rd 2010 - 06:21 UTC

  Havana launches debate on neo-capitalism and “the future of the Cuban Nation”

  

  Cuba began this week a public debate over landmark plans to lift the island's struggling economy and “preserve the revolution’s victories” by liberalizing some private enterprise, admitting small farmers private property, streamlining the vast state bureaucracy by leaving redundant a half-million workers.