Sources: Milenio, Univision, and Cuba public holidays. Earlier today, the Government of Cuba, at the request of Raul Castro, decreed in the Diario Granma (the Cuban official gazette containing all decrees) 2 new annual public holidays, December 31 and January 2, to take effect immediately.Although January 2 had been declared as a one-off public holiday in 2007 (our post of December 20, 2006) and had been used to show-off Soviet-supplied military hardware before the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1992, it will be a public holiday for the first time in 2008.
Workers in the sugar cane and other "emergency" agricultural sectors will have to work on those days, but they, as anyone who works on these days for any other reason, will get double-pay.
Finally, many news commentators have remarked that the decree, while re-stating the list of Cuba's public holidays, made no mention of Christmas, which was abolished as a public holiday in 1970, and then re-instated on the eve of Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998. However, the decree does explicitly state that it brings the number of public holidays from 7 to 9, which implicitly includes Christmas.
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