Eyeing
Cuba
Trinidad & Tobago Newsday
Port Spain
Petroleumworldtt.com
09 23 07
Trinidad and Tobago can look forward to an expanded
export trade with Cuba with the recent inauguration
by Prime Minister Patrick Manning and Cuban Vice
President Carlos Lage of our Trade Facilitation
Office in Havana.
Designed to assist in promoting trade between
the two Caribbean countries, it emphasises the
importance that TT places on the continued development
of trading links with the communist state.
The bilateral trade in 2006, in
excess of $65 million, represented 41 per cent
of Cuba’s
trade with Caribbean countries, with TT exports
to Cuba over the years including anhydrous ammonia,
bars and rods of non alloy steel, gas oil, liquefied
butane, liquefied propane and soft drinks.
Between January and September 2005,
the trade balance stood at $90 million in our
favour, according
to TT trade figures. There is no reason why we
can’t ramp this up.
The opening of the trade ofice
means that this country is positioning itself
to further penetrate
Cuba’s clearly significant US$2 billion import
market. According to Trade Minister Ken Valley,
the trade office will be authorised under Cuban
law to promote and facilitate trade between TT
and Cuba. “It will be designed to function
as a conduit between TT manufacturers and those
state companies authorised to import and to sell
to consumers,” he said, noting it will also
advise manufacturers what products can be exported
to Cuba.
What the office will certainly do is boost the
confidence of local manufacturers who want to expand
or even start trading with the island. For sure,
with a market of about 11 million people, manufacturers
are eyeing its potential.
Meanwhile, Manning has stressed
that despite the Trade Facilitation Office’s importance to
this country it should also be viewed in the context
of an additional strengthening of Cuba’s
ties with other members of Caricom.
It is certainly one of the most
crucial steps in this regard since the signing
of a Trade and
Economic Cooperation Agreement between Cuba and
Caricom in July of 2000 at the Community’s
Summit Meeting.
The significance of the two moves
to Cuba cannot be underestimated, especially
with the continuing
adverse effects on the Cuban economy of the decades
old US blockade of the island. In turn, Cuba’s
joining of the Association of Caribbean States
may have somewhat nullified the economic blockade
and this has not been tested because of feet dragging
by the US on the now stalled NAFTA.
But even without membership in
the ACS, it may be a good idea for the US to
cease acting as though
Cuba posed some great threat to it and lift its
economic blockade of the Caribbean nation. It’s
passe in a time of globalisation where boundaries
are no longer applicable.
The US, for example, not only maintains
full trading links with China, a one-time full
fledged Communist
country, but several leading American multinational
corporations have made huge capital investments
in China, making it one of the world’s most
powerful nations.
This has been at the expense of American jobs
being lost and the shutting down of countless plants
in favour of relocating to China, with its cheap
labour and high level of technology.
It would be in the social and economic interests
of both Caricom and the Association of Caribbean
States to seek to have the embargo lifted.
Trinidad & Tobago Newsday
Thursday, September 20 2007
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