The Danger of Dependence: Cuba's Foreign Policy After Chavez

The Danger of Dependence: Cuba's Foreign Policy After Chavez
By William M. LeoGrande, on 02 Apr 2013, Feature

On March 8 in Caracas, Raúl Castro, looking somber, stood in a place of
honor beside Hugo Chávez's casket during the late Venezuelan president's
state funeral. Castro was no doubt pondering what Chávez's death means
for Cuba's ambitious economic reform program -- or "updating" of the
economic model, as Cubans prefer to call it. Not long after Chávez's
first election victory in 1998, he and Fidel Castro signed the first of
what would become more than 100 bilateral cooperation agreements. By the
time Chávez died, Venezuela was providing Cuba with some 110,000 barrels
of oil daily at subsidized prices, worth $4 billion annually and
representing two-thirds of Cuba's domestic oil consumption. In exchange,
Cuba provided some 40,000 skilled professionals, working mostly in
health, enabling Chávez to extend health care into the poor barrios of
Venezuela, thereby solidifying his political base.

With the Venezuelan economy foundering under a huge fiscal deficit, will
Chávez's successor continue this barter arrangement on the same
preferential terms? If not, will the resulting oil shock derail Raúl
Castro's plan to move Cuba from a hyper-centralized planned economy,
which even its architect Fidel Castro admitted no longer works, to a
socialist market economy modeled on Vietnam and China? ..."

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12840/the-danger-of-dependence-cubas-foreign-policy-after-chavez