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N A
T I O N A L |
Havana.
September 27, 2005 |
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2. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL
IMPACT
2.1 Overview of the
impact of the blockade on some of the most vital
social sectors
The blockade has brought the Cuban people untold
sorrows. Highly vulnerable sectors upon which any
country’s wellbeing depends, such as food, health,
education, transportation and housing, have been
some of the main targets of this genocidal policy.
FOOD
In its obvious attempt to bring the Cuban people
to its knees through starvation, from July 2004 to
April 2005 the blockade has cost the food industry
approximately $ 55,863,957, money with which nearly
one third of this sector could be technologically
upgraded.
In 2004 alone, the blockade directly cost Cuba’s
poultry industry more than $ 16,100,000, undermining
a source of proteins for Cubans and crippling this
industry’s productive growth: with the $ 30,000,000
it lost, 750,000,000 eggs could have been produced.
As Cuba does not have access to state-of-the-art
technologies for the production of poultry meats,
chiefly manufactured in the United States,
production in this sector remained paralyzed during
the year and over 4,000 industry workers had to be
reassigned to other sectors, making the industry
lose $ 5,000,000 in added value with respect to meat
production, the equivalent of 8,800 tons of poultry
meat.
The Assorted Crops Company attached to the
Ministry of Agriculture estimated that, in the
import of potato and vegetable seeds from third
countries, extra freightage costs exceeded the sum
of $ 1,000,000, 50 % of the cost of vegetable seeds
imported every year.
Unable to place its Havana Club rum on the US
market and forced to commercialize it in third
countries under far less favourable conditions (because
of these countries’ remoteness and the nature of
their markets), Cuba Ron S.A. reported losses of $
28,400,000.
HEALTH
During the period covered by this report, the
blockade caused damages estimated at $ 75,700,000 in
the health sector. This figure says nothing of the
incalculable suffering endured by the Cuban people
because of a lack of medications, equipment and
other materials in all facilities which comprise the
national health network.
As was described elsewhere, so-called high-tech
branches in this sector, such as transplants,
cardiovascular surgery, nephrology and genetic
engineering, continue to be affected by unreliable
supply channels. Many of materials used in these
branches of medicine are produced in the United
States and, on a number of occasions, US authorities
have refused to grant Cuba permission to purchase
them or have simply protracted the process of
acquiring them ad infinitum.
This has had a direct impact on the programme for
children in need of hepatic transplants. An example
is the failure of Abbott Laboratories to reply to
Cuba’s request to purchase a piece of equipment used
to measure doses of the immune suppressor Tracolimus
(FK506), produced exclusively by this US lab, needed
to measure contents of this suppressor in the blood,
whose variations may bring complications such as
infections and secondary tumours.
$ 18,000,000,000 dollars in cholesterol-reducing
medication were sold in the United States in 2004
alone. If the Cuban-made polycosanol had been put on
the US market —and witnessed a mere 1 % of sales in
the market— the Cuban people could have seen an
income of $ 180,000,000 in 2004.
The following are some examples which reveal how
the blockade has affected this sector:
- No access to dialysis technologies and
accessories (artificial kidneys and their
component parts) sold in the US market, the
closest, most technologically developed and
competitive market. This affects the
country’s nephrology services, through which
1,839 patients, 30 of them children, receive
haemodialysis treatment.
- The purchase of diagnostic kits for the
medical entomology lab in distant markets,
such as the Asian market. The country would
have saved 30 % in spending —$ 52,116—had it
been able to purchase these kits from the
United States.
- Impact on the monitoring of and fight
against epidemics. The country pays 30 %
more what it would if it imported the needed
products and equipment directly from the
United States, saving on transportation and
intermediary costs.
- $ 1,518,905 in insecticides were spent
in 2004. Had these been purchased in the
United States, transportation costs would
have been reduced by 20 % (savings of $ 303,
781).
- The cardiology programme has been
affected as Cuba cannot acquire consumable
materials used in surgical procedures
directly from the manufacturers. Thus, Cuba
has had to pay an extra $ 66,275 in the
course of the year.
- The US company GIBCO produces Amniomax,
a product used to detect congenital
malformations in pregnant women over 38, the
only product in existence around the world
used to conduct these tests. Every year,
6,160 100 ml vials are imported for the
National Centre for Medical Genetics through
an intermediary. Could Cuba purchase it
directly from the United States, it would
save $ 136,700.
The losses in this sector (which guarantees that
all Cubans have free access to health care)
described above —a total of $ 506,756—could have
been used to finance:
The purchase of XP – Maxamaid (powder) and
XP – Maxamum (powder), products used in the
special diets of children with phenylketonuria
(whose yearly consumption would cost $
275,360).
The average yearly costs of Traculimus 0.5
mg, 1 mg and 5 mg, an immune suppressor
administered to patients that have had organ
transplants, calculated at $ 66,000.
The purchase of materials for a triple
vaccination campaign (rubella, parotitis,
measles), at around $ 156,212.
EDUCATION
The educational sector continues to experience
the problems described in the last two reports
submitted to the Secretary General, particularly
with respect to supplies of pencils, notebooks,
paper and other didactic materials and means, today
only at 60 % of what the country received in 1989.
The annual deficit in materials is calculated at $
3,990,000.
Obstacles continue to limit the number of
textbooks and supplementary bibliographies printed (of
a value estimated at $ 3,860,000).
Shortages in essential products continue to
affect middle and higher level learning institutions
and kindergartens; these include articles of hygiene,
clothing for children, school uniforms and shoes and,
in the case of kindergartens, indispensable
electrical appliances such as washing machines and
irons.
The difficulties that services for children with
special educational needs face as a result of the
blockade have continued to worsen. Cuba continues to
have difficulties obtaining and/or repairing Braille
systems for blind and visually impaired children (these
are bought at such high prices as $1,000 per unit,
when they could be bought at $ 700 in the US market),
Braille paper, equipment for special schools for
strabismic and amblyopic children, shortages of
which make it difficult for Cuba to maintain and
further expand its principle of "Education for
Everyone at all of Life’s Stages".
With $ 3,059,600, all of the material shortages
that today affect schools for children with special
educational needs could have been done away with.
Nearly 80 % of refrigeration units used to store
food products in the 786 middle-level educational
centres in the country are inactive or in a very
poor condition. A total of $ 9,420,000 —$ 1,884,000
spent every year over a period of five years—are
needed to completely repair these units, something
Cuba has not been able to undertake because of the
limitations imposed by the blockade. These
limitations also have an impact on the construction,
maintenance and repair of educational centres and
institutions and on the availability of school
facilities, especially felt in kindergartens.
According to calculations with respect to how the
Cuban economy has been affected by this genocidal
policy and in consideration of the percentage of
Cuba’s GDP devoted to the educational sector, had
the blockade been lifted, $ 166,000,000 would have
become available to the sector, enough funds to
eradicate the main shortages facing education,
estimated at $ 60,000,000.
SPORTS
The sphere of sports has been significantly
affected by the US government’s blockade.
The blockade has had a very negative impact on
the availability of material resources needed to
advance the numerous physical education and school
sports improvement programmes in existence.
The limitations and obstacles which the blockade
has imposed upon and thrown in the way of our
efforts to obtain balls, chronometers, appropriate
sporting footwear and the required technical and
auxiliary pedagogical equipment have had a far from
insignificant impact on our ability to establish all
of the material conditions needed to take physical
education to the highest possible levels at all
levels of education, an objective which Cuban
society and authorities consider a priority.
Blockade restrictions on the purchase, in the
United States, of raw materials used in the
production of sports instruments, including types of
rubber and chemical products which Cuba is unable to
produce, have forced Cuba to purchase these products
in European and Asian countries and to pay an extra
$ 72,000 in freightage alone.
To get a picture of how the blockade has affected
Cuban sports, suffice it to mention the concrete
effects that this criminal policy has had on
baseball, Cuba’s national sport. The country uses
approximately 30,000 balls for its professional
games and another 30,000 for school and amateur
games. Currently, the production of balls costs the
Cuban sports industry $ 0.95 a unit, as all raw
materials are imported from the Asian market: two
types of worsted, thread, glue, leather, ink and the
rubber or cork core.
Had Cuba access to the US market, it could employ
state-of-the-art technology and high quality raw
materials and avail itself of much lower freightage
costs to reduce production costs by 50 %, that is to
say, to about $ 0.45 / unit.
Cuba’s sports industry has been especially
affected by the limited possibilities it has to
upgrade its technology; were restrictions lifted in
this connection, Cuba would today have most of the
resources needed to make sports accessible to
everyone and offer high-performance athletes the
facilities they require.
The domestic production of baseball and soccer
shoes, boxing items such as gloves and head
protectors (which met the standards of the
International Boxing Association), punching bags and
other instruments used to train athletes for combat
sports, had to be discontinued because the needed
raw materials could not be obtained.
Sports instruments and accessories like those
mentioned above and many others, such as javelins,
poles, hurdles, specialized footwear and trampolines
—which could be produced in Cuba or purchased in the
United States at much lower prices—are currently
purchased in third countries, with a resulting
increase in costs of more than 50 %.
The planning and execution of the training
programme for high-performance athletes has also
suffered as a result of the blockade, which bars
Cubans from participating in sporting events,
conventions, training courses and international fora
held in the United States, which does not issue
visas or ignores the invitations made to Cuban
athletes or sports institutions, a consequence of
the veritable labyrinth of obstacles produced by
this policy.
The number of bilateral encounters and exchanges
with important US boxing, baseball, volleyball,
wrestling, gymnastic and basketball teams has been
significantly reduced, obliging Cuba to arrange
trips to Europe and other, more remote countries, in
order to hold practice games to train national
athletes, something which has increased the costs
associated with the high-performance programme
substantially.
Access to the market and the purchase of state-of-the-art
technologies that would be useful in the training of
Cuban athletes have been restricted, resulting in
higher levels of spending in this area.
(Continued... 1,
2,
3, 4,
5,
6)
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