Nadaleen Singh

T&T is send­ing its largest trade del­e­ga­tion com­pris­ing en­er­gy sec­tor of­fi­cials and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to the Ha­vana In­ter­na­tion­al Fair in Cu­ba at month end. The 23-mem­ber del­e­ga­tion will in­clude mem­bers of To­ba­go's pri­vate sec­tor, Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon an­nounced yes­ter­day.

"Cer­tain­ly the mar­kets have opened and this is be­cause of US re­la­tions with Cu­ba which have warmed," she said at the launch of TTBi­zlink's mo­bile in­spec­tion ser­vice at the Old Fire Sta­tion in Port-of-Spain.

The new­ly launched ser­vice seeks to op­ti­mise and sim­pli­fy for­eign trade and busi­ness process­es to re­duce time and costs. The min­is­ter said the new sys­tem will "mod­ernise the gov­er­nance and in­sti­tu­tion­al frame­work of the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow."

Gopee-Scoon de­scribed the up­com­ing trade fair as an op­por­tu­ni­ty as T&T's trade of­fice is on the ground and gov­ern­ment to gov­ern­ment re­la­tions are good. She said the 14 booths in the T&T pavil­ion at the fair are al­ready filled

Ad­dress­ing con­cerns about de­lays in pay­ments for goods, Gopee-Scoon said the Trade Min­istry is look­ing in­to a trade/fi­nance fa­cil­i­ty with the Ex­im­bank, "so ex­porters can be at a rea­son­able time frame of three months."

Ex­plain­ing the rea­son for the cur­rent lengthy process, the min­is­ter said: "The reg­is­tra­tion process is quite lengthy, and af­ter that there is ten­der­ing process and this is by the Cuban agen­cies. That's the sys­tem that is in place, that's what they have to cope with."

Com­ment­ing on oth­er de­vel­op­ments in trade, Gopee-Scoon said now that a par­tial scope agree­ment is in place with Pana­ma, T&T wants to deep­en its foot­print in that Latin Amer­i­can mar­ket.

She al­so re­vealed that Cab­i­net has ap­proved ex­ten­sion of the ex­ist­ing con­trac­tu­al arrange­ments with Crim­son­log­ic of Sin­ga­pore for US$2.8 mil­lion to en­sure con­tin­ued op­er­a­tion of TTBi­zLink from 2017 to 2019. She said this was done to in­crease T&T's com­pet­i­tive­ness.

The 33rd edi­tion of the Ha­vana In­ter­na­tion­al Fair FI­HAV 2016 takes place Oc­to­ber 31 to No­vem­ber 4 at the Ex­pocu­ba fair­ground. The event is re­gard­ed as the most im­por­tant gen­er­al trade fair in Cu­ba and the Caribbean, with all sec­tors of the Cuban econ­o­my tak­ing part. It pro­vides space for ex­hibitors and vis­i­tors to es­tab­lish com­mer­cial con­tacts, close busi­ness op­er­a­tions, ex­change ex­pe­ri­ences and up­date in new tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ments.

This year FI­HAV will have more than 20,000 square me­tres of net ex­hi­bi­tion area and ap­prox­i­mate­ly 4,500 na­tion­al and for­eign ex­hibitors from more than 60 coun­tries are ex­pect­ed to take part. Fair or­gan­is­ers say they ex­pect to re­ceive 150,000 vis­i­tors, which along with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of im­por­tant for­eign of­fi­cial and busi­ness del­e­ga­tions, makes it one of the most im­por­tant plat­forms for of pro­mot­ing Cu­ba's in­ter­na­tion­al links and re­la­tions with the world.

One mem­ber of the T&T del­e­ga­tion this year is Mario Sab­ga-Aboud, chair­man of Glob­al Brands Group which in­cludes Rit­u­als Cof­fee and oth­er in­dige­nous restau­rant brands. He said he wants to in­tro­duce a Cuban line of cof­fees at Rit­u­als out­lets.