Cuba’s President Raul Castro (left) talks to Rosa Virginia (right), daughter of Venezuela’s late president, during a wake at the military academy in Caracas.
AFP/Madrid
Cuba could be forced to step up its reforms following the death of its main ally, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, the most famous Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez said yesterday.
Venezuela’s new government “may cut the generous subsidy which Cuba gets from Venezuela which would push the Castro regime to open up to the outside,” Sanchez said by telephone from the northern Spanish city of Burgos, where she is taking part in a conference on social networks. “That would push Raul Castro to make more reforms of greater depth in the economic sphere, allow more investment from foreigners and exiles and allow even more people to be self-employed,” she said of Cuba’s current leader.
“That would lead the island to open up more, since at the end of the day it would imply a greater democratic opening,” added Sanchez, who often criticises the Cuban government in her prize-winning “Generation Y” blog, named after her first initial.
Venezuela’s leftist leader, who died at the age of 58 on Tuesday, gave generously to Cuba over the years, supplying the communist-ruled island with billions of dollars’ worth of low-cost oil from its vast reserves and paying royally for medical services.
Chavez came to Cuba’s rescue at a point when the communist-run island was in deep crisis after economic support that Havana had received as a client state of the now-defunct Soviet Union dried up a decade-and-a-half ago.
Moscow had been the financial mainstay of the island since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Fidel’s brother Raul Castro, 81, became president of Cuba in 2008.