CERCLE DIPLOMATIQUE - issue 01/2016

LE MONDE CUBA
A young Tiger just bursting its Chains
A monument for
Cuba‘s revolutionary
heroes.
FACTS &
FIGURES
As Cuba is step by step – ”sin prisa, sin pausa“ – transforming towards
liberalisation, the international business community is trying to rush in.
Text: Rainer Himmelfreundpointner
Havana as it is known.
With its cars from the 1950s,
driving the street along the
Cuban Capitol in the center of
Havana, the island has coined
a picture of socialism,
Caribbean style.
PHOTOS: FOTOLIA (1), COURTESY OF THE EMBASSY OF THE REPUBLIC OF CUBA, RALPH MANFREDA (1)
On the first three days of March 2016, a highranking
delegation from Austria, including
Federal President Heinz Fischer and his
wife Margit, Minister of Justice Wolfgang Brandstetter
and more than dozen top politicians and decision
makers, visited Cuba to celebrate the 70th anniversary
of diplomatic relations between the two countries
as well as to explore ways how to improve Cuban-
Austrian-trade which today is nearly invisible. As
they approached Cuba‘s capital Havana, which can
be reached directly via Austrian Airlines later this
year, some of them might have closed their eyes, digging
up pictures of a Cuba where an indefatigable
salsa energy amalgates into a long, slow, sweet seduction.
Maybe they imagined waves crashing against a
mildewed sea wall; a young couple cavorting in a
dark, dilapidated alley, guitars and voices harmonising
over a syncopated drum rhythm, sunlight slanting
across rotten peeling paintwork, a handsome
youth in a guayabera shirt leaning against a Lada, the
smell of diesel fumes and cheap after-shave; tourists
with Hemingway beards, Che Guevara on a billboard
– in short: images of a Cuba that is too audacious,
too contradictory to have been invented, and still
damned beautiful.
After having installed themselves in Havana,
some of them may have taken a walk to its central
Parque Fe del Valle, where they got a glimpse of a
different Cuba. Of a country trying to embrace the
first blessings of the 21st century after more than 50
years of living under a severe US-blockade, that has
just started to soften in summer 2015, when Cuba
and the US again opened bilateral Embassies. On the
one hand, recent visitors report, there are the usual
scenes of queues for the bakery and clapped-out
1950s cars weaving between piles of rubble. But on
the other hand, in this crowded, tree-lined square
every bench, wall, dustbin oder plant pot is occupied
with people hunched over laptops and gathered
around smartphones, swiping at tablets and gesticulating
at their screens. Sometimes three generations
of one family are huddled around a phone, the children
fighting over who gets to wear the headgear
while the granny holds a baby up to the camera for a
picture whats-apped to relatives in Miami.
This new Wi-Fi-hotspot in Havana is only one
phenomenon of the socialist state in transformation.
Since US-Cuban diplomacy opened a new page in its
Cuba
Official name:
Republic of Cuba
Capital and largest city:
Havana
Official language: Spanish
Ethnic groups:
64.1 % White, 26.6 %
Mulatto or Mestizo
9.3 % Black
Religion: 59 % Christian,
23 % unaffiliated, 17 % folk
religion (e.g. santeria)
Government:
Marxist–Leninist one-party
republic
- President: Raúl Castro
- First Vice President:
Miguel Díaz-Canel
Independence:
- from Spain:
December 10, 1898
- from the USA:
May 20, 1902
- Cuban revolution:
July 26, 1953 –
January 1, 1959
- Current constitution:
February 24, 1976
Area
- Total: 109,884 km 2
Population
- 2014 census:
11,238,317
GDP
- 89.5 billion $
(2015 nominal)
GDP per capita
- 7.990 $ (2015 nominal)
The Vinales Valley
in the countryside
of Cuba.
40 Cercle Diplomatique 1/2016