Spanish institutions support Cuba in strengthening its foreign trade

Over the last few months the 2nd Cuba-European Union Expert Exchange programme has managed two activities relating to the export of goods and services and business intelligence. The objective has been to exchange experience between various Spanish and Cuban public institutions.  

The programme, financed by the European Union and managed by FIIAPP, accompanies Cuba in the implementation of its socio-economic policy guidelines. Through it, key public policies are supported for the improvement of services to citizens. In this case, the partnership has been between the Ministry of Foreign Trade & Investment (MINCEX), specifically the Centre for Education on Foreign Trade and ProCuba, and various Spanish institutions. Participants showed particular interest in finding out more details on the sources of information and training used by institutions such as Asturex and ICEX for the pre-selection of markets abroad.   

In addition, the “country brand” and “denomination of origin” methodology also aroused great interest among Cuban institutions. There were also several conversations around the gender issue linked to foreign trade and digitisation.  

For MINCEX, the development of competitiveness and the export capacity of Cuban companies is essential to increase and diversify markets and contribute to the implementation of a technological trade monitoring system for the provision of services to the Cuban business sector. This will have a positive impact on the development of competitiveness and the export capacity of Cuban companies. The exchanges concluded with a firm commitment to give continuity to all the conversations started and to study the possibility of signing collaboration agreements with some of the participating institutions.