Addressing a meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union’s (EEU) intergovernmental council in Sochi, Russia on June 9, Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz invited the EEU to build an industrial park at Cuba’s Special Economic Development Zone, located in Mariel. The Special Development Zone (ZED) has a space of 465 square kilometers and a deep water port, whose construction has yet to be completed. Cuba has observer status with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
Located 45 km west of Havana, the ZED was created in 2015 to become a regional logistics and production hub offering preferential tax and customs fees for foreign companies to locate there and invest in the island and internationally. Mariel is ideally located along major shipping routes connecting it with major ports in the U.S., the Caribbean and South America.
In Volume II of its report The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land Bridge, the Schiller Institute highlighted the importance of the Mariel Development Zone and its potential to become a regional hub as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which Cuba itself has identified as a goal. As the Schiller report notes, Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Trade Minister, Antonio Carricarte said in October of 2017 that his country’s goal was to become a maritime and air transport center for the entire region, particularly in the Mariel Special Development Zone. “This goal for our country can connect us with China’s Belt and Road, for the purpose of extending that noble goal to the Caribbean and Latin America,” he said.
