DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN-CUBA: Making Communities More Livable

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 31 1998 (IPS) - The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), with support from Italy, is sponsoring a programme to improve living standards in Cuba through capacity building and participatory solutions to social problems.

The initiative, launched on Oct. 23, aims to reinforce community-based services, achieve sustainable management of the environment and improve living standards, all of which have deteriorated because of an economic crisis that has dragged on for eight years now.

The UNDP’s resident representative in Havana, Ariel Francais, said the programme, part of the UNDP’s global anti-poverty effort, was meant “to avert the threat of poverty and preserve the progress and equality achieved (in Cuba), which are now threatened by economic crisis”.

Francais said the programme was based on the recognition of the social achievements of the government of Cuban President Fidel Castro, and included projects designed to strengthen those achievements. The gains achieved in terms of reproductive health, opportunities for women, and access to health and education needed to be preserved, he said.

The first phase of the new programme will target Old Havana, and the provinces of Pinar del Rio and Granma, 176 and 842 kms from the capital respectively, viewed as two of Cuba’s poorest regions. According to official statistics, there were 724,402 people in Pinar del Rio and 821,493 in Granma at the end of 1997.

In the historical center of Havana, there are 70,658 people, most of them living in rundown houses, according to a population census carried out by the Office of the City Historian.

Giovanni Camilliari, the main technical advisor of the new programme, said although its start-up capital of 1.7 million dollars came from the Italian government, it will have a wide spectrum of funders, through decentralized cooperation, including regions and cities in Italy and other counties.

Francais said other European Union (EU) countries needed to be involved in this “novel mode of cooperation”, which follows up the action plan of the 1995 World Social Summit in Copenhagen.

Italian Ambassador to Cuba Giuseppe Moscato said “this novel paradigm of international cooperation” will build on the island’s strongest sectors, which will serve as “a tactical laboratory for human development”.

The initiative joins a long list pf projects the UNDP has funded or sponsored in Cuba, mainly in sectors such as forestry, energy, the protection of biodiversity and biotechnology.

On Jul. 17, the UNDP announced a qualitative change in its assistance to the island, with the approval of 300,000 dollars in direct aid to the government’s national biotechnology programme.

Raul Taladrid, deputy minister of foreign investment and economic cooperation, said that this new model of inter-regional and local cooperation “does not provide traditional aid to development”.

“The experiences that emerge from this programme for human development at the local level in Cuba could be useful in regional cooperation programmes with other Caribbean countries,” said Taladrid.