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Tourism up 16% to Cuba for 2003
HAVANA - (AP) - A decade after many predicted
Cuba's economy would collapse as it struggled with the abrupt loss of critical
Soviet aid and trade, the communist island continues its recovery and registered
2.6 percent growth in 2003, economic planners said. Economics Minister Jose Luis
Rodriguez credited this year's marked improvement in Cuban tourism for much of
the growth as he gave his annual year-end report to the Cuban parliament.
President Fidel Castro, and his younger brother and designated successor,
Defense Minister Raul Castro, attended the session along with other high-ranking
government officials. The Castro brothers, along with virtually all other
high-ranking members of the Cuban government, also sit on the parliament.
Speaking to nearly 550 Cuban lawmakers at the session, Rodriguez noted that
Cuba's estimated growth for this year was far better than the 1.5 percent growth
registered across Latin America and Central America during the same period.
Cuba enjoyed particular economic success in tourism, with a 16 percent increase
in income for 2003 over the previous year, he said. Tourism throughout the
Caribbean plummeted last year as people cut back on air travel after the
September 2001 terror attacks on the United States. But Rodriguez said 1.9
million people visited Cuba in 2003 - up 12.7 percent from the previous year -
as travelers shook off their earlier fears and Cuba continued to promote tourism
as its No. 1 source of foreign currency needed for international trade.
Rodriguez projected continued growth in tourism for 2004.
Osvaldo Martinez, head of the parliament's economics committee, recalled
that in December 1993 many had predicted Cuba's imminent collapse as it wrapped
up "its most difficult, most anguished year" economically. "For traditional
political and economic thinking, it was impossible that a small, underdeveloped
nation that from one day to the other had lost 85 percent of its commercial
trade, its petroleum supplies ... could survive," Martinez said.
Since, Cuba has replaced sugar with tourism as its primary source of hard
currency. It also now produces much of its own natural gas and petroleum, along
with much of its own food. With the focus on tourism, almost four times as many
people now visit Cuba as they did a decade ago, when less than 550,000 traveled
to the island annually. The island also has nearly quadrupled the number of its
hotel rooms, to 41,600. "From an economy traditionally structured around the
production and exportation of sugar and some other basic products, we have gone
in 10 years to a more modern and less vulnerable structure," Martinez said.
Along with tourism, Cuba also is now developing its scientific and technical
sectors, especially in biotechnology, and the production of medicines and
medical equipment, as potential sources of foreign income, he said. But sugar,
once the locomotive that ran this Caribbean nation's economy, in 2003 still
struggled with an ongoing restructuring of the industry, Rodriguez said. He said
the annual harvest for the 2002-2003 year was just 2.2 million metric tons, far
smaller than other recent harvests averaging around 3.5 million metric tons.
Harvests more than a decade ago were commonly 6 million to 7 million metric tons
a year, but they slowly declined over the years and the Soviet Union's collapse
erased what was once Cuba's most lucrative market for sugar.
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