Havana, Cuba.- As part of the country’s strategy to prevent further deterioration of roads and promote their repair, the National Road Center projects applying some 100,000 tons of asphalt to repair the National Highway this year.

Raúl Díaz Guadarrama, general director of the entity affiliated with the Ministry of Transportation, told Granma that, over the last three years, financial and material resources have been made available to restore the highway.

“So far the critical problems are located on stretches in Cienfuegos and Mayabeque, where, through the first part of the year, there were occasional interruptions in the work due to a shortage of asphalt, however, the time lost has been recuperated,” the director stated.

Among maintenance and investment projects on the country’s network of roads and highways, prioritized are those that guarantee the tourist development, followed by others such as the Mariel Special Development Zone, the National Highway, the Central Highway, and Vía Blanca.

Toward this end, among the center’s main objectives for 2020 is to increase the amount of asphalt destined for the Central Highway, focusing on critical sections that pose a risk of accidents.

Another major difficulty involves determinng responsibility for road and street repair.

In this sense, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez has insisted that the repair of municipal roads must be assumed by each territory and alternative solutions for local development must be sought due to limitations on the availability of equipment.Díaz Guadarrama pointed out that there are 5,862 bridges in the country, with 304 in poor condition, of which 100 are scheduled for repair. Efforts will depend on the availability of equipment and specialized work crews, he said. According to the Director of the National Road Center, airport runways are the first priority in allocating asphalt, basically the José Martí in Havana and Abel Santamaría in Villa Clara.