Despite the economic embargo the U.S. has maintained against Cuba since 1962, the communist island imported from its northern neighbor products – mainly food – valued at more than $4.4 billion over the past eight years, government officials said.

“Since the operations were begun in December 2001 to date, Cuba has paid to its U.S. counterpart more than $4.4 billion,” said the online edition of the weekly Opciones quoting the president of the state-run firm Alimport, which buys food abroad, Pedro Alvarez.

The trade blockade which Cuban authorities blame for all the island’s ills does not include food or medicines.

Opciones wrote that “the purchases of agricultural food products by Cuba from the United States maintained an ascending trend until 2005, when they reached their largest figure in volume, (but) they suffered a decline in the past three years.”

Alvarez attributes the fall-off in food purchases to the fact that the embargo has remained in place, the international financial crisis and the lack of loans available to the Cuban government.

Diplomatic sources say that Havana is on the verge of slipping from merely a lack of liquidity into insolvency.

“Alimport has shifted imports that were (being) made from the United States to other more secure markets without impediments on exports to Cuba, and which also, in their turn, provide loans, things that are kept clearly in mind during the period in which the international economic crisis has influenced the increase in food prices,” the weekly said.

Cuba imports four-fifths of the food its 11.2 million citizens consume, despite the fact that the state has kept more than half of the island’s cultivable land idle for decades, according to President Raul Castro.

Source: Herald Tribune