Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, whose country has come close to expulsion from the International Monetary Fund, began a visit to Cuba attacking the financial institution for not helping developing nations.
Mugabe was to meet with Cuban President Fidel Castro Monday. Castro’s communist-run country has not been a member of the IMF since 1961.
“We have never been friends of the IMF and we shall never be friends of the IMF,” Mugabe said on arrival in Cuba Saturday.
“The IMF is never of real assistance to developing countries. It is wielded by the big powers. It is the big powers which dictate what it should do,” Mugabe told reporters.
Still part of the IMF
The IMF’s executive board, which has twice put off expelling Zimbabwe, postponed a judgment on its future membership Friday, but pledged to revisit the issue within six months.
Zimbabwe, which has been in continuous arrears to the IMF since February 2001, paid the fund $120 million two weeks ago but still owes about $175 million.
The IMF board said it had deferred acting on the country’s membership because of recent payments of arrears and some small exchange rate and monetary policy steps.
Zimbabwe is struggling with unemployment of more than 70 percent, chronic shortages of food and fuel, and a collapsing local currency. Its economy has contracted by more than 30 percent in the last six years.
Monday, Zimbabwe’s Central Statistical Office said inflation accelerated to 265.1 percent in the year to August from 254.8 percent in July.
That is a retreat from a record of 623 percent annual inflation in January 2004, but remains among the highest in the world.
Mugabe's government blamed for economic woes
Zimbabwe’s economic woes have been worsened by the withdrawal of international donor aid over policy differences with Mugabe’s government, especially its controversial seizure of white-owned commercial farms for landless blacks.
Critics blame Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, for the country’s economic crisis. Mugabe says the economy is being sabotaged by foreign and domestic opponents of his rule.
On his ninth visit to Havana since 1978, Mugabe praised Cuba’s “big heart” for providing medical assistance to Zimbabwe. There are 173 Cuban doctors serving in Zimbabwe, officials said.
