“We go to a Congress to debate and propose solutions, and those analyses and proposals have to be in accordance with what the people expect from the debates, because we are representing the militancy, our Party’s grassroots organizations, but, above all, we are representing the people”.

With this conviction, defended by the President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, and assumed by the capital delegates to the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), concluded this Saturday, in Havana, the process of study of the documents that will be presented at the meeting, reported Granma newspaper.

At the meeting, which was attended by José Ramón Machado Ventura, Second Secretary of the PCC, and Salvador Valdés Mesa, Vice President of the Republic, as well as Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and other representatives of the Party and the Government, the President reiterated that the economy is the main challenge we face, in the midst of an increasingly complex situation, aggravated by the intensification of the blockade and the impacts of COVID-19.

There has been an attempt to sow an opinion that the country is hiding behind the blockade to cover up its own inefficiencies, said Díaz-Canel; however, although we have shortcomings, the blockade, “cruder today than ever”, is a “constant pressure”, “a total cruelty” that cannot be erased from the memory of the people for all that it has cost us, especially in the last five years.

But our economy, he added, “considered very battered and incapable”, has sustained the fight against the pandemic, with favorable results compared to many countries.

Today, he pointed out, we lead the world in the number of patients recovered from COVID-19, with 94.1 % of those infected, and the lethality rate is among the lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean.