Cuba cancels employees’ day parade as extreme oil shortages chew – Repeating Islands


Ed August (The Guardian) writes about Cuba’s cancellation of the Could 1 (Worldwide Staff’ Day) parade this 12 months. Nevertheless, celebrations in native communities, colleges, and workplaces will go forward, below situations of austerity. “President says island is simply receiving two-thirds of the petrol it wants as queues outdoors gasoline stations stretch for miles.”

There was a time when Worldwide Staff’ Day was marked in Cuba by parades involving greater than one million folks marching by way of Havana’s Revolution Sq.. Many got here out of conviction, some as a result of they had been pressured, others to benefit from the get together.

This Monday, nevertheless, the sq. will probably be empty, after the Cuban Communist get together cancelled this 12 months’s celebrations because of gasoline shortages which might be crippling the island’s financial system.

For weeks, motorists have been sleeping of their automobiles outdoors petrol stations in queues that stretch for miles and final for days.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel has stated the island is simply receiving two-thirds of the petrol it wants, and that the shortfall is because of provider nations failing to fulfil their contractual agreements.

Jorge Piñon, director of the College of Texas at Austin’s Latin America and Caribbean power and surroundings program, stated this was an allusion to Venezuela. The 2 socialist nations have had a barter settlement since 2000: Cuba sends Venezuela docs, lecturers and – allegedly – counterintelligence brokers in alternate for shipments of crude. That deal is now being strained.

[. . .] This has put Cuba in a quandary: the island has loads of crude, however it’s of low high quality and the island’s refineries are unable to course of it. Venezuela’s higher-quality crude, it appears, is now going to the US.

Money-crunched Cuba struggles to purchase gas, and even diluents which might be used to refine high-sulphur crude into gasoline, on the worldwide market.

“Most stress” sanctions, imposed by the Trump administration and largely left in place by President Biden, play into this, knocking billions of {dollars} a 12 months off state international foreign money earnings, penalising oil tankers that dock on the island and slicing credit score traces.

Economists warn that if the scenario persists, meals costs will rise and productiveness will fall even decrease. This 12 months’s sugar harvest is about to be the worst in over a century after diesel shortages have prevented cane attending to refineries.

Regardless of the malaise, Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, the pinnacle of the Staff’ Central Union of Cuba, stated on Tuesday that employees’ day gained’t be utterly cancelled. Celebrations in native communities, colleges and workplaces will go forward, below situations of “most austerity”, he stated.

William LeoGrande, professor of presidency at American College in Washington DC, who has written extensively about Cuban politics, stated that turnout for the Could Day parade has step by step diminished over time as the large pleasure and hope in regards to the social modifications the revolution caused within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies has been largely changed by disappointment in regards to the hardship because the Nineties. [. . .]

For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/30/cuba-workers-day-parade-cancelled-oil-shortages



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