Foreign investment in Cuba may total as low as $500 million despite claims by Havana and some U.S. groups that it is about $5.6 billion, a Chilean economist said Saturday in Miami.
Only Bulgaria ranked behind Cuba in foreign investment over the past few years, Maria Werlau told the closing session of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy's annual three-day conference.
The conference was attended by more than 100 members of the 6-year-old group, created to bring together economists, historians, political scientists and others interested in studying aspects of the Cuban economy ranging from the environment to military spending and tourism.
Cuba's uncompleted and controversial Juragua nuclear power plant will cost about $2 billion to finish, not the $800 million initially calculated by an Italian firm, said Jonathan-Benjamin Alvarado of the University of Georgia Center for International T rade and Security. Cuba is spending $30 million a year just to keep the plant in mothballs.
But most of the dozens of panelists noted that studying Cuban economics is difficult because of the absence of some official data and lack of credibility of other data provided by the Cuban government and officials.
For example, when suicides jumped to politically embarrassing levels in the early 1990s, the government stopped publishing suicide statistics for a year and later folded them into the category of ``violent deaths'' in an apparent attempt to hide them, sociologist Maida Donate said.
The Cuban economy shrank 32 percent to 35 percent from 1990 to 1993, according to some official Cuban figures, and by 45 percent to 48 percent according to others, University of Pittsburgh economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago told a seminar on the reliability o f Cuban economic data.
``We don't even know how they calculate their gross national product,'' Mesa-Lago said. ``So what is my conclusion on all this? I don't know. I just don't know.''
© 1996 The Miami Herald.