Expert William Pitt, owner of confiscated mines on the Island, points out that companies are reducing their investments
14ymedio, Havana, 12 April 2024 — In a video showing a fleet of trucks, backhoes and machinery, the director of Mining in Cuba, Joaquín Ruiz Quintana, said on Wednesday that Cuba plans to export 50,000 tons of nickel this year. The amount, the manager announced without disguising his enthusiasm, will reach 100,000 tons by 2030, if business with the Canadian mining company Sherritt continues to boom.
And everything seems to indicate that it will, says Telesur, which sent a reporter to verify the results of Sherritt’s “million-dollar investments” in three mining enclaves of the Island: Moa, in Holguín; San Felipe, in Camagüey; and the Sierra de Cajálbana, in Pinar del Río. “Unfortunately, mining must be done in a sustainable way,” said Ruiz Quintana, who suggested that “care for the environment” – and, of course, the “financial persecution” of the United States – are the only limititations on mining in Cuba.
Businessman William Pitt, who has often denounced in this newspaper the Cuban government’s plunder of the Pitt-Wasmer family’s mines – several of them in Moa – is not so convinced of Ruiz Quintana’s forecasts. Pitt, who considers the data offered by the manager a mirage, is blunt: neither Sherritt nor other mining companies, such as the Australian Antilles Gold, “are going to take the chestnuts out of the fire for the Ministry of Energy and Mines.”
A metric ton of nickel is quoted at $17,439, much less than the $23,894 of a year ago for the same amount
According to Pitt – who not only knows the mines that Fidel Castro confiscated from his family in 1960 but also has taken legal measures against Sherritt – the “growing” investments that the regime attributes to the foreign mining companies operating on the Island are plummeting. The explanation is in the world market, “where the prices of the minerals that Cuba produces have plummeted.”
The case of nickel and cobalt illustrates the situation. A metric ton of nickel is quoted at $17,439, much less than the $23,894 of a year ago for that amount. “At the current price it w
