May 19, 2025
Juana Lilia Delgado Portal
The BRICS represent a viable path through which the island could address some of its problems, Juana Lilia Delgado Portal, minister and president of the Central Bank of Cuba, said in an interview with Sputnik today.
“We are in a situation in which the economic, commercial, and financial blockade that Cuba has suffered for more than 66 years is intensifying, and, of course, the BRICS constitute a very important alternative for Cuba, in which it finds the possibilities of being able to integrate with projects, of really being able to find those partners with whom it can relate from an economic, commercial, financial, investment, and cooperation point of view,” said the executive, speaking at the BRICS Women’s Entrepreneurship Forum, which was attended by more than 1,400 participants from 50 countries.
The BRICS are a multilateral association created in 2006. In addition to Russia, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, it now includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Cuba, Uganda, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Uzbekistan officially became partner states of the group on January 1, 2025.
Currently, this bloc accounts for 36% of global GDP, surpassing the 29.3% of the G7 and the 14.5% of the European Union (EU).
“We have had requests from many of the participants [in the Forum] to establish economic relations with our country, to learn about our reality, to delve deeper into the ways in which Cuba can become more integrated into the BRICS,” Delgado Portal shared. According to the directive, the BRICS play an important role in transforming the current financial architecture, which, she says, does not really solve all the problems of the global south.
“The possibility opened up by this organization, based on the use of the national currencies of its member countries for transactions between countries, is an alternative that represents an important and far-reaching change for countries,” said the president of the Caribbean country’s Central Bank.
For Delgado Portal, this implies “breaking” with one of the greatest pressures facing many nations: “The dependence on the use of the US dollar in international transactions,” from which Cuba can benefit.
The construction of a truly multipolar world, she asserts, goes hand in hand with the need for alternative media, which are nothing more than “a possibility to convey the realities of our peoples, which do not always find a place in the hegemonic media, where information is manipulated and not presented with the required accuracy, and in many cases is not even presented at all.”
Source: Cuba en Resumen