The Cuban archipelago is made up of 4,195 islands, cays, and islets, grouped into four main sub-archipelagos: Los Canarreos, De Los Colorados, Jardines de la Reina, and Jardines del Rey. Until the late 1980s, Jardines del Rey, the largest of the Cuban sub-archipelagos with some 400 cays and islets, had mostly pristine landscapes of mangroves, […]

Distortion of history to aid control by a central government is a thousands-of-years-old technique. Since at least the times of Pharaoh Ramses II, rulers have successfully altered the historical record. In more recent times, George Orwell (1949) wrote: And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then […]

Notes1 In August 2001, the Cuban Government announced that it would conduct a census of population and housing from September 7 to September 16, 2002, the first census of the island’s population in over 20 years, and only the third such census since the revolutionary takeover of 1959.2 The census count was carried out and […]

La producción agropecuaria, como todas las actividades de la economía cubana, sufrió un enorme impacto negativo al perderse las subvenciones soviéticas al término de los años 1980. Hasta fines del 2004, las estadísticas oficiales reflejan algunos signos de recuperación en determinados cultivos. Sin embargo, el sector agropecuario globalmente continúa en condiciones bastante desfavorables. La actividad […]

Cuba’s “de-dollarization program” was initiated with the approval of Resolution No. 65 by the Banco Central de Cuba (BCC) on July 23, 2003. Resolution No. 65 established the convertible peso (CUC) as the only acceptable currency for all entities that had previously accepted U.S. dollars; mandated the conversion of their U.S. dollar holdings to convertible […]