Their Spanish friends
You may have read elsewhere that the Cuban Minister for Foreign Affairs, Felipe Perez Roque, has just returned to Havana after a “successful” tour of several European nations, including Spain.
In Madrid, Perez Roque met with his Spanish counterpart, Angel Moratinos, who later told the media that relations between the two countries remained muy buenas - very good.
Makes you wonder whether the two men discussed the issue of Cuba’s foreign debt to Spain.
According to a confidential report obtained by the Spanish daily El Mundo, the Castro regime currently owes Spanish companies a grand total of 1,708 million Euros.
And Havana is in no hurry to pay up – the report says payments are late or simply not made.
The Spanish companies providing the goods and services don’t mind too much because it seems the debt is eventually carried by the Spanish administration through export insurance arrangements.
In other words, the debt ends up being carried by the poor Spanish taxpayers.
As the article states, this generosity on the part of Madrid has not stopped Fidel Castro and his thugs from freely and regularly attacking Spanish ministers whenever they are deemed to have stepped out of line.
In Madrid, Perez Roque met with his Spanish counterpart, Angel Moratinos, who later told the media that relations between the two countries remained muy buenas - very good.
Makes you wonder whether the two men discussed the issue of Cuba’s foreign debt to Spain.
According to a confidential report obtained by the Spanish daily El Mundo, the Castro regime currently owes Spanish companies a grand total of 1,708 million Euros.
And Havana is in no hurry to pay up – the report says payments are late or simply not made.
The Spanish companies providing the goods and services don’t mind too much because it seems the debt is eventually carried by the Spanish administration through export insurance arrangements.
In other words, the debt ends up being carried by the poor Spanish taxpayers.
As the article states, this generosity on the part of Madrid has not stopped Fidel Castro and his thugs from freely and regularly attacking Spanish ministers whenever they are deemed to have stepped out of line.
When the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, had the temerity early in his term to call for "democratic change" on the island, the Castro regime went berserk, attacking the Socialist leader as an American lackey, etc, etc.
It worked, says the paper: Zapatero has refrained from making such statements since. And Havana still refuses to pay its debt.
posted by Luis M Garcia at 10:00 am
1 Comments:
Seen this? from www.theaustralian.com.au/highered
Cuban democracy
SNITCH
March 21, 2007
SOCIAL scientists are fond of "speaking truth to power". But some kinds of power are so vulnerable they are better comforted than confronted. How else to explain Tim Anderson's article "Why Cuba is a democracy and the US is not" for Onlineopinion.com?
In case the title is not self-evident, try this killer argument: "The president of Cuba's Council of Ministers (falsely called a dictator by the imperial US president) is not above the National Assembly and has no power to veto a law passed by his country's National Assembly." Anderson, a political economist at the University of Sydney, devotes just two of his 2328 words to the name Fidel Castro. He does so when referring to an attempt on the life of this modest cog in the great machine that is Cuban democracy.
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