The open nature of the Cuban economy and its external dependency condition that the evolution of its business relationships is a key variable to explain the problems faced and assess future prospects. Therefore, it is essential to know the challenges that the country's trade and integration into the international economy to avoid making new mistakes and repeating some. Increasing the amount of exports of goods and services, proceeding to a change in the material structure of exports and implementing efficiently the process of reduction and replacement of purchases made in increasingly complex international markets, inaccessible and unpredictable volatile in terms of price, it is an urgent task for Cuba. It sounds easy, but this is a complex processes in which interact, internally, structural failures of an excessively centralized model with financial and monetary problems, of infrastructure and logistics, insufficient internal dynamic characteristic of efficient economic processes, and economic subjects who are unrelated, unmotivated and sometimes disqualified. The following table shows the performance of trade in goods and services with the uniqueness of a global surplus balance of trade (export revenues exceeding expenditures on imports) determined by the significant surplus of net exports of Cuban professional services to several developing countries....

The evolution of the Cuban economy in recent years has been influenced by several processes: the international economic crisis; the application of the “Economic and Social Policy Guidelines” which sum up the changes are taking place in the country’s economic system; and the intensification of the U.S. economic, commercial and financial blockade. In this context, Cuba’s GDP growth rates are insufficient and, as of 2013, have shown a tendency to stagnate 20131 (see table 1). During the first semester of this year, this “growth” was just 0.6 percent. Table 1: Source: ONEI. Anuario Estadístico de Cuba, 2012, Havana, and Panorama Económico y Social de Cuba, 2013. Abril 2014 edition. Clearly, without sufficient growth rates of at least three percent, all of the country’s goals will remain indefinitely postponed. The Cuban economy’s open character and its external dependence means that the evolution of the external environment is always key to explaining problems and challenges facing the country’s own evolution; moreover, the external environment in many cases determines the country’s future prospects. Therefore, to avoid making errors, or even worse, making the same errors over and over, it is essential to analyze the challenges facing Cuba’s trade and insertion in the international economy....