Castro gets an economics lesson in China
Changes in China bewilder Cuban leader Castro, whose country's economy is still reeling from the loss of Soviet subsidies
BEIJING - China and Cuba are two of the last remaining one-party communist states in the world, but the similarity just about ends there.
For 76-year-old Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who last visited China seven years ago, the difference was bewildering.
Visiting China after seven years, Cuban President Fidel Castro met a new generation of Chinese leaders, such as Vice-President Hu Jintao who is expected to take over as president next week. -- REUTERS
'I can't really be sure just now what kind of China I am visiting because the first time I visited, your country appeared one way and now when I visit it appears another way,' he said when he met the head of China's legislature, Mr Li Peng, on Thursday.
'You can say that every so often your country undergoes great changes.'
Cuba muddles on with a planned communist economy still reeling from the loss of Soviet subsidies.
Meanwhile, China has become aggressively mercantile, growing into the world's manufacturing powerhouse.
Its cities are littered with new high-rises, their streets clogged with vehicles.
Mr Castro, who arrived in Beijing on Wednesday, was briefed on China's economic reforms by Vice-Premier Wen Jiabao, the country's No 2 economic official, the official Xinhua news agency said.
It paraphrased the visiting Cuban leader as saying he has always closely followed China's development and hoped to learn from it.
China and Cuba ran along parallel communist tracks for years after Mr Castro took power. China undertook first the Great Leap, which created a famine that killed an estimated 30 million people, and then the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong's convulsive last attempt at perpetuating his revolution.
Their histories began to diverge, though, as China embarked on reforms after Mao's death in 1976.
Beginning in the 1980s, the planned economy was steadily dismantled, setting the stage for today's relative prosperity - even while the Communist Party maintained its stranglehold on political power.
The bases of that growth - foreign investment totalling hundreds of billions of dollars and the emergence of a dynamic private sector - remain largely alien concepts in Cuba.
China, which is Cuba's third most important trading partner after Venezuela and Spain, now provides hundreds of millions of dollars in economic credits to Cuba, as well as some direct aid.
China took over as Cuba's main political and financial partner in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The trade balance, however, clearly favours China. According to official figures here, Cuba exported US$70 million (S$120 million) worth of goods to China in 2001 while it imported US$547 million worth of goods from that country.
Mr Castro's talks with Chinese President Jiang Zemin earlier this week focused on economic ties and concluded with the signing of an economic cooperation agreement and Chinese aid package for Cuba.
As the last remaining leaders of the communist world, Mr Castro has developed close personal ties with Mr Jiang, who visited Cuba in November 1993 and April 2001.
During his visit, Mr Castro met Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji.
He also met Vice-President Hu Jintao, who is expected to take over as China's president at the annual legislative session beginning next week. --AP, AFP