Word: cuba
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...Despite all that, Chávez vows to keep spending, especially on social programs such as public housing and health. He has also flaunted his petro-wealth over the past few years, by giving money and free oil to allies like Bolivia and Cuba. Such generosity may be unsustainable, as Chávez is discovering. He provided cheap heating oil to poor Americans in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere until last week, when Venezuela's financial meltdown forced him to scrap the program...
...Cuba needed a new law on pensions for the best of reasons. Cuba’s life expectancy had increased. Cubans live on average as long as Europeans or North Americans. Such heightened life expectancy summarizes many of Cuba’s achievements of the past half-century. Fewer infants die at birth in Havana than in Washington, DC. Over the decades Cubans acquired better access to nutrition, curative and preventive health care free of charge, schooling to obtain the information needed to lead healthier lives, options for physical exercise in state-supported athletics and sports, and all under conditions...
...massive problem of unfunded pension liabilities. The old law permitted retirement for women at age 55 and for men at age 60. The new law increases those ages to 60 and 65, respectively. The impact of longer life expectancy on retirement plans is common in Europe and Japan. However, Cuba is different because, unlike Europe or Japan, it is a rapidly aging but poor country. Plus, unlike China, which is about to age rapidly as well, Cuba lacks a reliable economic growth path of its own that would not depend on external subsidies, which in recent years have come from...
...power to enact such a change but proved allergic to this and other reforms. It fell to Raúl Castro to have the guts to enact this change during his first year as president and to do so on the same year when the world economy collapsed, hitting Cuba hard as it has other countries—the worst of times...
...Cuba's fertile land and favorable climate allowed all three types of tobacco leaves used in a cigar - the wrapper, filler and binder - to be harvested on the island, and sailing ships were soon distributing Cuban tobacco from Europe to Asia. Columbus had claimed Cuba for Spain, and the Spanish soon cornered the nascent industry, mandating in the 17th century that all tobacco for export be registered in Seville; they later tightened their stranglehold on the market by forbidding Cuban growers to sell the crop to anyone but them - a monopoly that persisted until...