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Greece was in a tug of war with the European Union yesterday over whether the government will adopt additional measures to rescue its economy, as Athens pushed for the eurozone to put together a more specific assistance package that would deter speculators, reports Kathimerini.

Having already announced cuts in public spending and some tax hikes, the PASOK government was yesterday prompted by EU officials to come up with more ways to reduce its public debt and deficit.

Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou was due to be put under more pressure yesterday and today, when the finance ministers of the eurozone will meet separately but he insisted that no extra measures are needed at this time. Instead, he argued that following an expression of political support from eurozone members last week, more specific details about the help that Greece could expect needed to be put forward. “My guess is that what will stop markets attacking Greece at the moment is a further, more explicit message that makes operational what was decided last Thursday.”

Markets attacking Greece. This is precisely the position the Greek Finance Minister is taking regarding the dire situation of his country’s finances. Targeting investment banks and the shady world of hedge funds appears to top Papaconstantinou’s agenda as he accused his EU partners of creating a “psychology of looming collapse,” according to the EU Observer.

Yet, investment firms including Goldman Sachs arranged currency swaps for Greece over the last decade that allowed Athens to raise funds to reduce its budget deficit while pushing payments well into the future. Those transactions were not classified as loans, reports the the New York Times, and not made known to Brussels officials.

European Commission economy spokesman Amadeu Altafaj Tardio told a news conference in Brussels that the EU’s statistics office, Eurostat, has already sought answers to the allegations, but Mr Papaconstantinou defended his country’s actions.

“These kinds of more exotic financial instruments were, at the time, completely Eurostat legal,” he said. “Greece was not the only country using them. They have since been made illegal and Greece has not used them since,” he added.

But skepticisim over the Greek position reigns in other Eurozone countries including Germany, which is expected to lead an eventual Greek bailout. Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

Historical revisionism related to the financial crisis is in high gear. Higher powers are blamed, Wall Street is ascribed supernatural influence and bankers have been credited with omnipotence. Indeed, high finance is now said to have lured Greece with a siren song of concealed debt, to Europe’s vexation.”

“But this mystification conceals reality. Those responsible for the Greek debt crisis can be found in Athens. The Greek government made promises to the country that it couldn’t afford. That is why they worked with the investment bank Goldman Sachs to conceal the true dimensions of public debt from the European Union budget watchdogs. The adage currently circulating in Brussels is true: There are lies, damned lies and Greek statistics. Yes, Goldman helped in the deception and even profited from it. But the bankers weren’t sirens. Competition mandated that they offer all of their financial products to those who were willing to pay for them — including governments who were only interested in cheating.

The BBC brings the focus in on neither the Greeks nor the hedge funds but the very volatile Euro:

…there are widespread doubts among those who support the euro that it can survive in its present form whilst fiscal policies are decided at the level of national governments.

So as Nicolas Veron of the Bruegel Institute says “the markets are testing the limits of the single currency policy framework”.

In fact, concludes the BBC, the respected economist Paul Krugman had a take on all this today: “The real story behind Europe’s troubles lies not in the deficit but in the policy elites, who pushed the Continent into adopting a single currency well before the Continent was ready for such an experiment.”

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• EU Wants Answers From Wall St. On Greek Debt (econotwist.wordpress.com)
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• EU Wants to Know about Wall Streets Role in Greek Debt (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)

Very few cemeteries and little suitable land ... a man surveys hundreds of bodies outside the Port-au-Prince morgue. Photo: AP

The devastation in Haiti from the 7.0 earthquake is the latest example of what happens when the exploitation of a nation and of a people knows no end.

In May of 2009, Former US President Bill Clinton was appointed UN Special Envoy to Haiti. While Clinton underlined his passion for Haiti, a country which he “first fell in love with when he and Hillary traveled there 35 years ago,” very little has been made of his not-so-discreet political and economic maneuvering which helped further impoverish the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Time Magazine’s blog, Swampland, sums up the Clintonian relation with Haiti as such:

… Haiti was the first place that Bill Clinton intervened abroad as President. Reading his memoir, you get the sense that he considered it an unfinished piece of business for his administration — and his legacy. He had sent the U.S. military into Haiti to put President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power, and later handed that operation over to a UN multilateral force. But it was far from an unblemished success. Aristide stumbled. Clinton also blamed Republicans in Congress for refusing to give Haiti the financial assistance that he believed could have made a difference. After Aristide was sent into exile amid renewed strife in 2004, Clinton reflected on the words of Hugh Shelton, the commander of the American forces: The Haitians are good people and they deserve a chance.

Yet, when Clinton assisted ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to power, it was with a ‘minor’ caveat: Haiti would implement the IMF’s rigid ‘austerity adjustment‘ in an effort to redefine the country’s economic outlook. The website GlobalExchange.org, in its effort to highlight international injustices perpetrated by the IMF, writes:

In Haiti, the government was told to eliminate a statute in their labor code that mandated increases in the minimum wage when inflation exceeded 10 percent. By the end of 1997, Haiti’s minimum wage was only $2.40 a day.

On top of this, the Haitian market was flooded with subsidized American rice which plunged the already poor Haitian rice-farmers into an even deeper chasm of poverty:

Over the past two decades, a period of growing IMF tutelage over the Haitian economy, exports of American rice to Haiti have grown from virtually zero to more than 200,000 tons a year, making the poverty-stricken country of 7 million people the fourth-largest market for American rice in the world after Japan, Mexico and Canada. According to U.S. and Haitian economists, the result has been a massive shift in local consumption habits, with many Haitians now choosing cheap imported rice at the expense of domestically grown staples, including rice, corn and millet.

In his essay 30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?, Bill Quigley confirms that Haiti ‘has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S.’ while rice is one of the most heavily subsidized American commodities, receiving an average of $700 million a year by 2015:

The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

Naomi Klein would identify this as Shock Doctrine economics 101.

So, you may ask, what do Clinton’s mistakes from 16 years ago have to do with today’s rescue efforts and humanitarian relief? Or, rather: Isn’t it callous to attack the UN Special Envoy to Haiti in the midst of that country’s worst national crisis?

The answer is simple: No. Especially as he may very well be responsible for said crisis.

In a story on the quality of building in Haiti, The New York Times writes:

“In Haiti, most if not all of the buildings have major engineering flaws,” [in quoting Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity]. Most houses and other structures are built of poured concrete or block, there being very little lumber available due to mass deforestation, said Alan Dooley, a Nashville architect who designed a medical clinic, built of reinforced concrete, in Petite Rivière de Nippes, a fishing village 50 miles west of Port-au-Prince.

Concrete is very expensive — much of the cement for it comes from the United States, Mr. Dooley said — so some contractors cut corners by adding more sand to the mix. The result is a structurally weaker material that deteriorates rapidly, he said. Steel reinforcing bar is also expensive, he said, so there is a tendency to use less of it with the concrete.

The LA Times takes the discussion one step further, giving a comparative example of what such an earthquake can do in an impoverished nation and what it can do in a country like the U.S.:

Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech, [...] said that the Haiti quake was almost the same size as the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California. That quake, she said, “caused a lot of damage, but it wasn’t a disaster like this in terms of the number of people injured and killed.”

High-quality construction and strong building codes (in countries which have the governmental authority and integrity to enforce them) appear to be determining factors in keeping earthquake casualty counts and overall destruction low. In April 2009, in L’Aquila, Italy, a 5.8 earthquake killed 307 people and caused significant damage to buildings and homes for the mere reason that building codes had been violated, and governmental complacency had allowed for such flawed construction to continue. Haiti’s endemic poverty, however, is what led to the building of such flawed structures. Without being able to afford proper materials, Haitians built their homes, schools and hospitals with weakened concrete and no steel reinforcement bars. The result is the current humanitarian disaster.

So, if we accept the premise that the devastation caused by Haiti’s 7.0 earthquake was largely due to poor building practices born out of the very same poverty created by the IMF and Clinton, it can then be deduced that Clinton and the IMF are largely responsible for Port-au-Prince’s casualties.

All things considered, one must now ask, is Bill Clinton really the right person to help Haiti?

Adding to the growing flux of carbon emissions into the atmosphere is the burst of hot air issuing from the world’s most powerful leaders who, to the dismay of the G77 countries, reached an ‘11th hour agreement between 27 key countries on a watered-down declaration’, reports Denmark’s Politiken.

South Africa’s Mail & Guardian writes that Sudan’s delegation spoke in less euphemistic terms, saying that the results of the brokered accord in Africa ‘would be like the Holocaust by causing more deadly floods, droughts, mudslides, sandstorms and rising seas.’ According to Sudan’s Lumumba Stanislaus Di-aping, the document ‘is a solution based on the same very values, in our opinion, that channelled six million people in Europe into furnaces.’

Despite Sudan’s strong language, which received a rebuke from Sweden’s chief negotiator Anders Turesson, Bangladesh’s The Daily Star confirms the G77’s opinion that the deal is ‘inadequate.’

As The Guardian writes:

The deal was brokered between China, South Africa, India, Brazil and the US, but late last night it was still unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session.

The agreement aims to provide $30bn in funding for poor countries to adapt to climate change from next year to 2012, and $100bn a year after 2020.

But it disappointed African and other vulnerable countries who had been holding out for far deeper emission cuts to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5C this century. As widely expected, all references to 1.5C in previous drafts were removed at the last minute, but more surprisingly, the earlier 2050 goal of reducing global CO2 emissions by 80% was also dropped.

It would appear, then, that the developed countries lacked the ‘moral leadership’ Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed called for during a meeting with President of the European Commission, Mr José Manuel Durão Barroso. Miadhu News, in fact, states that in ‘referring to the EU’s commitment to reducing emissions by 20% by 2020 and by 30% when other developed countries make comparable efforts, President Nasheed stated that the 30% target should not be conditional.’

However, New Scientist writes in its blog that the result of this much-hyped gathering is a ‘draft text [which] is the most vague we’ve seen so far, with all specific targets for cutting emissions stripped out, replaced by a list of the commitments that various nations have already made.’

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While delivering a speech to fellow Latin American leaders at the ALBA Summit in Havana, Raul Castro echoed his brother’s denunciations of the United States in a demonstration that little, if nothing, has changed in the relationship between the small island nation and its large northern neighbor. ALBA — a Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America — is an international cooperation organization based on the idea of social, political, and economic integration between the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Raul Castro’s speech was published today in the online edition of the Cuban regime’s paper, Granma.

The establishment of military bases in the region is an expression of the hegemonic offensive that the U.S. government is deploying and constitutes an act of aggression against all of Latin America and the Caribbean. There is an evident intention to make concrete its political-military doctrine of occupying and dominating at any price the territory that it has always considered its “natural backyard.”

The reactivation of the 4th Fleet, with announced operative-strategic maneuver capacities even within the interior waters of the countries of the region, demonstrates that there will be no limits in order to achieve its plans, apart from the imposition of the resistance that we are capable of offering.

Earlier in the week, according to reports from Iran’s Press TV, Fidel Castro addressed similar issues in a letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Fidel Castro has criticized the US empire for launching an offensive, this time with the help of a “friendly smile and African-American face.”

In a letter to visiting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the 83-year-old former leader warned Latin America that the empire is on the offensive again.

He blamed the US for the Honduran military coup that overthrew deposed president Manuel Zelaya and condemned Washington’s latest military accord with Colombia, which allows US forces to use seven Colombian military bases for the next ten years.

Castro’s letter was read by Chavez at an ALBA summit in Havana on Monday.

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• Cuba and Venezuela criticise US (news.bbc.co.uk)
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Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was attacked this evening following his appearance at a political rally in Milan, reports La Repubblica.

The attacker, Massimo Tartaglia, a 42 year old engineer with a history of mental illness, emerged from a crowd surrounding the PM and threw a miniature replica of Milan’s Duomo at Berlusconi, hitting him in the face and breaking his nose, two teeth and cutting his mouth.

Tartaglia was taken into custody and was questioned for three hours.

Tartaglia’s father, Alessandro, admitted his family voted for Italy’s Democratic Party, and against Berlusconi, but has ‘no hate’ towards the Prime Minister. “He never hurt anyone,” he said. “I believe this is the result of the current negative climate in Italy.”

Berlusconi, instead, is reported to have told a confidante he escaped serious injury only by ‘miracle’. “Had he hit me a little higher and I would have lost an eye.”

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American student Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend have been found guilty by an Italian court of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, reports the BBC.

Knox, 22, bowed her head and burst into tears as she was jailed for 26 years for murder and sexual violence. Italian Raffaele Sollecito, 25, looked impassive as he was given 25 years.

Miss Kercher, 21, a Leeds University student from Surrey, was found with her throat slit in Perugia in 2007. Knox had denied killing her in a sex game.

But prosecutors said Sollecito held her down while Knox stabbed her to death.

The pair committed the killing with small-time drug dealer Rudy Guede, 22, who was jailed for 30 years for murder and sexual violence last October.

Police are still not certain why Knox, Sollecito and Guede were all at the house together, but they suspect it involved a drugs transaction.

In a final appeal to the court, Knox yesterday said she was “disappointed, sad and frustrated” after two years in jail but “trying to keep my spirits up”.

“Now the decision comes. I feel vulnerable in front of you,” she told the eight-member jury, reports ANSA.

American reactions to the jury’s verdict have been negative, pointing to the botched nature of the investigation and what appears to many as Perugia Public Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini’s trumped up charges against Knox.

You can’t believe the hysteria, the anger against Amanda Knox. All my Italian friends think she’s guilty,” author Doug Preston tells 48 Hours Mystery correspondent Peter Van Sant. “This is a case based on lies, superstition and crazy conspiracy theories. It’s a tragedy.”

Douglas Preston, author of The Monster of Florence, encountered Perugia Public Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini while researching in Italy, but soon found himself persecuted by the prosecutor on trumped up charges as well. Mignini dragged Preston into his investigation of the longstanding Monster of Florence mystery accusing Preston of involvement in murder cover-ups.

The New York Times goes into further detail:

After the serial murders [ of The Monster of Florence] stopped, a prosecutor decided to reopen the case. His theory was that the killer or killers were Satanists from an ancient cult that harvested body parts. That prosecutor is the same one in the Knox case – Giuliano Mignini.

“One day I’m walking down the streets of Florence when my cell phone rings,” said Preston in an interview. “They say, ‘This is the police – we’re coming to get you.’” For three hours, the author was interrogated by Mignini about possible connections to the case. His phone calls with co-author Spezi had been wiretapped, and Mignini asked him to explain things. Preston said he was told he must confess to perjury or obstruction of justice.

Preston is indicted – Mignini has that power – but then told he can go free if he leaves Italy. The author departs the next day, banished, humiliated and deeply troubled.

Having known Mignini’s penchant for Satanic cults and inventing accusations, Preston looked at the case against Amanda Knox and saw a rogue prosecutor and a miscarriage of justice.

“There was no evidence,” he told The New York Times. “I realized it was all bogus. Mignini believes that Satan walks the land and anyone who is against him must be working for the other side.”

The Italian media have also been at the center of the firestorm, accused of generating an anti-Knox campaign before the trial even began. Knox was called a ’she-devil’ throughout the Italian media and by the prosecution, and Italian television found her occasionally unusual behavior as a confirmation of her guilt.

The Guardian reports that Knox’s parents criticised the media for the way their daughter had been portrayed, alleging this swayed the judges and jurors. They said in their statement: “It appears clear to us that the attacks on Amanda’s character in much of the media and by the prosecution had a significant impact on the judges and jurors and apparently overshadowed the lack of evidence in the prosecution’s case against her.”

Knox and Sollecito were told they must pay a total of 4.4 million euros to the Kercher family as compensation for Miss Kercher’s murder. Knox was told she must also pay 40,000 euros compensation to Patrick Lumumba for defaming the local barman when she falsely accused him of the murder.

The semi-naked body of Miss Kercher, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found in a pool of blood with her throat slit, in her room in Perugia in November 2007. She had been sharing a house with Knox, who was also a student, on her year abroad in the Umbrian hilltop town.

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For those of you who thought that the United States would be the capital of white collar crime following the escapades of Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns ad AIG, think again.

The Moscow Times reports that companies in Russia experienced more economic crime this year than anywhere else in the world:

Of 86 companies surveyed in Russia, 71 of them — 82.5 percent — said they had been subjected to at least one major economic crime in the past 12 months, according to a report released by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“This is a shocking 12 percentage point increase compared with our 2007 research (59 percent), and is well above the global (30 percent), Central and Eastern Europe (34 percent) and BRIC countries (34 percent),” the report said. The BRIC countries are Brazil, Russia, India and China.

This report comes days after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called corruption the “main problem of the Russian economy” and promised a clampdown against corruption and lawlessness across Russia.

As US President Barack Obama prepares to visit Asia for the President’s first-ever dialogue with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the issue of the President’s race is having more of an impact on Chinese netizens rather than his foreign or trade policies.

For the past few months, the television viewers of China’s “Jia you! Oriental Angels,” a Chinese version of American Idol, have been engaged in a mix of soul-searching and identity questioning as they followed the rise of the show’s leading star, Lou Jing, a half-black, half-Chinese contestant, who has on more than one occasion been likened to President Obama himself. What has actually followed is an outpouring of racist sentiment against Lou Jing and her mother by Chinese ‘netizens.’

Lou Jing was born of an extra-marital affair her mother had with an African-American, who later returned to the United States. While Lou Jing has been attacked for being a mixed-race child, her mother has been openly denigrated for her marital indiscretions.

ChinaSmack.com, one of the many English-language Chinese blogs following the debate over Lou Jing, documented the series of racist attacks against the reality pop star. In a post titled “Shanghai ‘Black Girl’ Lou Jing Abused By Racist Netizens,” blogger Fauna traces the series of exchanges between Jing and viewers that appeared across the internet. The website NetEase stated that “many netizens learned that Lou Jing was born after her married mother had [extra-marital] relations with a black man, and let loose a torrent of abuse on the internet” while the site KDS took the racism to another level with the following:

Lou Jing’s mother had a husband, then had an extramarital affair with a black man, then gave birth to Lou Jing, and then after her birth divorced. And that black devil, after fucking ran back to his home in Africa. It is unimaginable how that Shanghainese man [husband], excited and anxious to see his own “daughter”, must have felt when he saw that she was black…

On August 30th, 2009, Lou Jing responded to her attackers in kind with a clarificatory post on KDS where she explains:

I am DragonTV Angel Lou Jing, and here I make a statement!
1. My father is American, not African.
2. I am a born and bred Shanghainese person.
3. I should not have to bear my parents’ mistake, I am innocent!
4. Sternly but strongly protest some people’s racism, my skin color should not become a target of attack!
I reserve the right to take legal action!

Nonetheless, comments on ChinaSmack appeared to escalate racist sentiment rather than diffuse it. While one reader wrote ‘Fucked by a black. How come a zebra wasn’t born?’ another said “I cannot help but say, those coming out of mixing yellow and black blood are all truly ugly, a dirty feeling [appearance]…”

Meanwhile, website ChinaHush.com did it best to underline that despite appearances, Lou Jing is Chinese through-and-through.

“Chocolate” girl Lou Jing’s skin color lets people mistaken her for a foreigner. In fact, she is an outright Shanghai girl, and she speaks fluent Shanghai dialect. On the stage, [...], Jing Lou sang a classic Shanghai opera piece…

The ongoing debate over Lou Jing echoes another case of discrimination against China’s small but growing minority of mixed children, half-black and half-Chinese. Ding Hui, China’s first black volleyball player, attracted international attention when he was booted off the national team for his color. Writing in The Guardian, journalist Steven Vines says:

A stark reminder of official racism came last year when Ding Hui, of mixed Chinese and African parentage, was barred from representing his country in the national volleyball team.

Vines goes on to confirm the widespread trend of racism throughout China:

One leading actress, Jiang Ziyi, who has an Israeli boyfriend, has routinely been accused of betrayal for consorting with a foreigner… China officially lists 56 approved ethnic minorities within its borders, but discussion about ethnic differences is largely taboo. Racial tensions have recently broken out between the Muslim Uighur population, who look more like Europeans, and the “Chinese”-looking majority.

Though the website Shanghaiist.com debates the fact that Ding Hui was booted off of the team out of discrimination saying that said booting actually never happened, it confronts and welcomes the debate of inherent racism in Chinese society, likening Hui’s supposed fate to that of Lou Jing’s:

Ding Hui’s presence on the national team has the potential to improve or worsen China’s issues with racism—and it will probably do a little bit of both. On the one hand, it reinforces stereotypes of African blood endowing people with exceptional athletic gifts—and, conversely, Asian blood being a distinct disadvantage in that area. On the other hand, his presence in the public eye will make more people aware that people like him do exist, do speak native Chinese (media repeatedly remark [sic] that both Ding and Lou speak Chinese, and only Chinese), and absolutely expect and deserve an active role in Chinese society—including representing their country in athletic competition.

The vocalized vitriol against mixed-race children is a stunning occurence in a period in time in which the Chinese government and Chinese companies are heavily increasing their investment presence in Africa. Nonetheless, the future of such debate in the Chinese media and exposure to the presence of mixed-race Chinese can only further sensitize what is still an insular society to the social-cultural fruits of globalization.

Regarding Lou Jing and her future (she was eliminated from the Top 30 of “Jia you! Oriental Angels”) The Guardian has the full dish: “In two years she will graduate. After that she plans to study in Europe or America.”

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Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has offered Africa $10b in concessional loans over the next three years along with a range of other measures aimed at strengthening African-Chinese ties, reports Uganda’s The New Vision.

The aid offer, announced yesterday at a China-Africa summit in Egypt, is double that unveiled by President Hu Jintao at the last summit in Beijing in 2006.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is one of the 10 African leaders attending the two-day summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh. Also present is indicted Sudanese president Omar el Bashir.

Besides the loans, the Chinese premier said his country would help Africa develop clean energy and cope with climate change, as well as cooperate in science and technology.

He also vowed to expand market access for African products, boost food security and cancel more African debts.

China’s presence in Africa has been growing over the past few years as the Asian superpower has engaged in lucrative exchanges with many of the African’s continents needy nations. As the BBC reported in 2007, “Africa’s need for new and better roads, school buildings, computer networks, telecoms systems and power generation has opened a lucrative window of opportunity for Chinese firms.” These same firms then gobble up the mineral resources “that promise to keep China’s booming, fuel-hungry economy on the road.”

While the West has been made uneasy by China’s resource- and land-grab, some African thinkers see the current Sino-African relations as a new take on colonialism. In a Council on Foreign Relations debate in 2007, Senegalese journalist Adama Gaye declared China “another imperial power pursuing its national interest, and it can be an unreliable partner despite its claim to build a true equal partnership with Africa.”

Is China’s expansion in Africa the first thrust of the BRIC countries neo-colonialist effort? And is it a threat to the West’s future prosperity? Or is Peter Guest, in his recent article in The Guardian correct in quoting Rwandan President Paul Kagame when he says “Africa is not a marginal player squeezed between two great giants. The cold war is over and the new world… is not. Africa – the whole developing world, in fact – is building relationships with a multitude of partners, some who subscribe to [the West's] values and some who do not”?

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• China pledges $10bn Africa loans (news.bbc.co.uk)
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The Russian and Cuban governments have signed four agreements for oil exploration and production on the Caribbean island, says the Latin American Herald Tribune.

Under the accords, Russian state energy firm Zarubezhneft has been given permission to operate for 25 years in blocks located in the Cuban provinces of Matanzas, Sancti Spiritus, Villa Clara and Ciego de Avila, Cuban state television said.

Cuban Basic Industry Minister Yadira Garcia and Russian Deputy Trade and Industry Minister Ivan Materov attended the signing ceremony, which took place at Russia’s pavilion at the International Trade Fair in Havana, which got underway on Monday.

The deal represents the countries’ first bilateral oil agreement since the demise of the Soviet Union, which subsidized the Cuban economy for decades.

It also coincides with a ramping up of Brazilian investment in Cuba, reports Cuba’s state-controlled news outlet, Granma.

The Brazilian state oil company Petrobas is likewise carrying out seismic tests in the bloc it acquired last October from Cuba’s exclusive economic zone in the Gulf of Mexico for oil exploration and drilling.

Spain’s Repsol-YPF, Norway’s Norsk Hydro, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Malaysia’s Petronas, Venezuela’s PDVSA, Vietnam’s PetroVietnam and Brazil’s Petrobras all have signed oil-exploration deals with Cuba’s communist government.

The question remains whether or not the United States is missing out on the oil buffet that is happening at its door-step.

As the US World and News Report wrote on March 3rd, 2009:

The future drilling by foreign oil companies as close as 45 miles from the shores of Florida injects new dimensions into the debate in the United States over the embargo. Some decry the lost opportunities of a policy that still aims to isolate Cuba while other countries do the opposite. Others worry about ecological risks of any oil spills, which ocean currents would tend to carry toward the Florida Keys and the state’s east coast beaches.

Expectations in Cuba are that the oil finds will help boost the Cuban economy. Perhaps they will even thaw US-Cuban relations?

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• Russia to drill for oil off Cuba (news.bbc.co.uk)
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