Jose R Oro*, contributor to Prensa Latina
As we all know, Cuba is a world reference in education. Employed population: 4.4 million people, with an unemployment rate of only three percent. With a high technical and professional level, more than 18 percent of the working population are students. With nearly 13 percent of GDP invested in this sector, no other country in the world, including the most developed, can match this Caribbean island that has turned its social policies into a model for developing countries. Timor-Leste and Denmark follow Cuba with 11.3 and 8.7 percent of GDP spent on education, respectively. For comparison, the United States invests just 5.4 percent, or twice as much as Cuba and Canada at 5.5 percent.
In Latin America, Bolivia is second behind Cuba at 7.6 percent, while Mexico and Argentina spend 5.2 and 5.8 percent, respectively. This guarantees the continuity of the technical education of the Cubans. In the next few installments, the issue of Cuba’s human resources and their training, among other development components, will be discussed in more detail.
Despite the blockade and its enormous consequences, the UN classifies Cuba as a country with a high level of human development. The inequality indices (Gini) show that Cuba has a fairly structured society. All of this affects the country’s human resources and, more generally, its ability to utilize resources.
But alongside all the numbers and indicators, I would like to mention a giant of Cuban scientific thought and an understanding of resources like few others, Prof. Dr. Luis A. Montero Cabrera:
“Many believe that Cuba’s greatest wealth of scientific potential is its human component. Decades of supporting science under precarious conditions compared to our global competitors has significantly weakened our innovation potential in terms of physical and infrastructural resources. In contrast, since the revolutionary reform of 1962, our high-quality, equitable, universal and free education system and a university education shaped by science have meant that the personnel dedicated to the development of innovations through science and technology in Cuba have very unique qualities has. These qualities make our human scientific potential truly exceptional and extremely competitive on today’s world stage. The recent phenomenon of the miraculous response to COVID-19, with highly effective treatments and vaccines that have saved thousands of lives even in the midst of external aggression that would be insurmountable for many, is irrefutable evidence.
In our university environment we experience the use of many brilliant creative talents on a daily basis. It is a common criterion, the assertion that if we could take full advantage of it, we would enjoy spiritual and economic progress that would determine remarkable well-being for all Cubans. Unfortunately, this goal, which the Cuban Revolution had yearned for as something essential since the promotion of knowledge began in 1961, was not fully achieved. It is no secret that for many years and in the current socio-economic situation, the dysfunctions resulting from six decades of blockade by the world’s most important economic power and the resulting international disadvantages for an essentially open economy have prevailed. We also carry the legacy of structural dogmas of a shipwrecked socialism that the leader of the Cuban Revolution himself realized he didn’t know how to build and that this was “our biggest mistake”.
The blockade tries to prevent Cuba from developing its resources of all kinds.
The anti-Cuban blockade, so often mentioned, is a series of measures of economic coercion and aggression involving genocidal behavior aimed at causing economic suffocation and immobility in Cuba, with the aim of inducing the population to lose their trust in the revolutionary Government to evade and resign socialism that precisely this blockade prevents construction. It is a unilateral policy that is a flagrant violation of Cubans’ human rights. This is how the experts and especially the MINREX reports to the UN define the cruel and unfair policy of the US government against Cuba more than 60 years ago.
On February 7, 1962, then US President John F. Kennedy declared the total blockade against Cuba through Section 620a of the Foreign Aid Act (1961).
The precursors to this law date back to 1959, when Washington began applying measures essentially aimed at undermining vital points of Cuba’s defense and economy. I would like to point out that this date is of the utmost importance as it predates the October Crisis by eight months and the discovery by U-2 spy planes of the presence of Soviet nuclear-capable missiles on Cuban territory. The blockade is by no means a consequence of the October Crisis, but de jure preceded it by eight months because it had actually existed in its embryonic form since the end of 1959.
Prior to the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, US companies held large interests in mining and energy assets on the island, including the Nicaro and Moa nickel operations, the large Matahambre copper mine, and the smaller El Copper, various mines on the island producing like Charco Redondo (manganese), Cayo Guam and La Delta (chromite), while oil companies operated several refineries in Cuba. Since the beginning of the 20th century, geologists from the United States have been documenting Cuba’s mineral resources such as chromium, iron ore and manganese; and during World War I and World War II, the United States sent commissions of geologists to prospect for strategic minerals (Hayes et al., 1901; Burchard, 1919; Park, 1942; Page and McAllister, 1944; Guild, 1947). For example, from 1916 to 1940 the United States imported more than 720,000 tons of chromite ore from Cuba (Thayer, 1942). This export figure for chromites (both metallurgical and refractory grades) multiplied many times over the next two decades.
In 1958, Cuba was the third largest nickel producer in the world, accounted for four percent of the world’s copper production and was a major producer of manganese and chromite. Almost all of this production was aimed at the US market and in the case of manganese and chromite as a low unit value concentrate, they were very sensitive to transportation costs and practically disappeared from the scene until 2020 when a new chromite mine in Camaguey started operating.
Attempts were made to destroy the nickel/cobalt industry in Cuba, for example the Moa nickel factory (now Pedro Sotto Alba) was left without engineers when it was built but not yet operational. Only the will of the Commander of the Minister of Industry Ernesto “Che” Guevara and the unique talent of the Cuban engineer Demetrio Presillas managed to put into operation what was then the most modern and advanced plant for the production of nickel/cobalt by acid leaching, a technology that was unique in the world at the time produced Ni/Co sinter for the metallurgical refinery at Port Nickel, Louisiana, and instead shipped that sinter to the Urals, or much later to Fort Saskatchewan, Canada. I am only giving these examples to make it clear that the energy mining sector has been the hardest hit by the brutal blockade from the beginning of this criminal and illegal dream. If we see in the table below from Cubadebate that the direct impact of the blockade was $5,570,000,000 in 2019-2020, it means that $506 was pulled directly from the pocket of every Cuban, and it happened continuously in one form or another others for more than six decades. The indirect amount is impossible to calculate and beyond the numbers are the non-material damages inflicted on people or, in an almost invisible way, on the economy.
To illustrate with an example, if we wanted to put a manganese deposit into production, where do we find the miners that we have to train from scratch, those from Charco Redondo, Boniato or La Maya, they have already died or they are less old live in Bayamo, Santiago or Havana, with no continuity at the local level. Cuba has formed a multitude of great professionals in geology, geophysics, mining, metallurgy, topography, blasting, mineral processing, environment, heavy machine operators of all kinds and many other specialties who have not been able to fully express their talents because of the blockade.
In other words, in the mining and metallurgical sector, the blockade has affected both the exploitation and strengthening of natural resources and the exploitation of Cuba’s privileged geographical location for their export or the generation of wealth for the benefit of the Cubans to the huge investments in education many thousands of professionals (hundreds of them with scientific or educational degrees), thousands of technicians and skilled workers. (Continuation)
rmh/jro
*Cuban engineer living in the United States
(Taken from selected companies)