Cuba wants to pay off part of its debt in rum

According to authorities in the Czech Republic, the government of Cuba has proposed resolving a Cold War-era debt by paying the Czechs in a treasured Cuban commodity: rum.

On Thursday, Czech Finance Ministry spokesman Michal Zurovec said Cuban officials had offered paying back $276 million in the form of rum, reported the Associated Press. The debt dates back to when both Cuba and then-Czechoslovakia were firmly within the Soviet geopolitical orbit.

Zurovec said his government is weighing the offer, but would prefer at least partial repayment in cash.

Cuba, a communist isle stifled for decades by a U.S. embargo, is saddled by a tremendous amount of external debt — measured at the end of 2014 to be about $24.7 billion, or 31 percent of the country’s GDP.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba took out development loans from private, non-U.S. banks and then defaulted in 1986.

In recent years, it managed to reach agreements over debt forgiveness from a string of major countries, including Japan, Mexico and Russia, which wrote off $32 billion in Soviet-era debt in 2014.

Last year, a group of 14 nations, mostly wealthy European countries, jointly decided to give Cuba “extraordinary debt relief,” forgiving some $8.5 billion in debt while restructuring the repayment of some remaining $2.6 billion over the next 18 years.