China strengthens Cuba tie with trade deals

President Raul Castro (center) was joined by President Hu Jintao of China (right) in Havana yesterday. (Enrique De La Osa /reuters)

HAVANA - China's president was signing dozens of trade and investment deals with communist ally Cuba yesterday, part of a Latin American trip on which Chinese businessmen have been snapping up all manner of raw materials.

Taking the long view at a time of financial crisis, China is investing heavily in commodity-producing countries, and Cuba is no exception. The deals agreed to by President Hu Jintao included purchases of Cuban nickel and sugar, along with pledges to send food and building materials to help the Caribbean nation recover from three major hurricanes.

Other deals promise stronger ties in the future, such as a Chinese commitment to help renovate Cuba's aging ports, which are vital since Cuba receives virtually all its imports by sea.

Hu also thanked Cuba for sending doctors to China after last year's devastating earthquake, and for educational programs on the island attended by about 2,000 Chinese citizens.

Accompanying Hu yesterday on a visit to a school for Chinese students, Cuban President Raul Castro sang snippets of a song about China and Mao he said he learned as a young man.

At first, the hundreds of students gathered in an auditorium seemed confused, but they soon sang along, clapping in time.

"Even though the physical distance that separates China and Cuba is great, friendship between both people goes back a long way," Hu said.

Cuba depended heavily on Soviet largesse and turned away from China during the Cold War's Sino-Soviet split. But ties warmed after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

With bilateral trade topping $2.6 billion a year, China is Cuba's number-two trading partner after Venezuela, where socialist President Hugo Chávez provides nearly 100,000 barrels of oil a day to the island at favorable prices.

The ties have brought a tangible benefit to residents of the Cuban capital, where more than 3,000 shiny new Yutong buses replaced the infamous, smoke-belching 18-wheeled "camellos" of the Soviet era.

But Hu's visit poses something of an ideological challenge because some Cubans speculated that Raul Castro might follow a Chinese model of reform after becoming president in February. China transformed its economy three decades ago by embracing market reforms even as its Communist Party maintained strict political control.

Cuba's communist government, however, still controls well over 90 percent of the economy and shows no sign of easing its grip on political or economic matters, even as Raul Castro has expanded foreign trade 39 percent since becoming president and signed a major offshore oil exploration deal with Brazil.

On the eve of Hu's visit, the Communist Party newspaper Granma praised China's reforms as having "sparked a gigantic investment process that brought quick results."

But it also criticized "the evils of such an accelerated spiral: unequal distribution of the country's income, a marked difference between city and country, and the erosion of the environment."

Hu brought a large delegation of Chinese businessmen who have busily pursued deals despite the global financial crisis, continuing a trend that has seen China's trade with Latin America jump from $10 billion in 2000 to $103 billion last year.