As expected, Cuba’s latest census, held in September 2012, shows the island’s population to be stagnant and aging.
Final statistics released earlier this month by Cuba’s Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas show that the island had 11,167,135 inhabitants, down from 11,177,743 in the previous census 10 years earlier.
Cuba’s sugar sector has probably failed its first major test since the government abolished the appalling bureaucracy of its once-powerful Sugar Ministry.
The current harvest, at best, will yield 1.44 million metric tons compared to a projected 1.7 million tons.
Cuba’s top diplomat in the United States, José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, may be a man of his time. The youthful-looking Cabañas, who’s not much older than the Cuban Revolution, was dispatched to Washington at a time when U.S.-Cuba relations are clearly stuck in a deep freeze.
He has a reputation for being shrewd and intelligent, with special aptitudes for pressing Cuba’s agenda and making important connections to the Cuban exile community. Those skills may serve him well if the political winds shift and Cuba’s relations with the United States warm before President Obama leaves office in January 2017.
Holguín is one of the five provinces established in 1976 by splitting up the former province of Oriente. The others are Las Tunas, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo.
Failed efforts to find oil off Cuba’s northwestern coast led the Castro government to turn to old friends in Moscow.
Russian state oil giant Zarubezhneft currently has an exploration concession off Cayo Santa María in north-central Villa Clara province in an area 330 km east of Havana labeled Block L.
NOTE: This is the second in a series of monthly articles on Cuba’s 15 provinces by cartographer Armando H. Portela, who has a Ph.D. in geography from the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
The province of Ciego de Avila was born in 1976, when the government replaced Cuba’s original six provinces with 14 new administrative divisions. Ciego de Avila covers 6,783 square kilometers (2,620 sq miles), including 589 sq km (204.5 sq miles) of adjacent keys — or 6.2% of Cuba’s total land area.
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