San Juan, May 2 (EFE).- Cinefiesta, San Juan’s prestigious international short film festival, has canceled its next edition after finding it lacked sponsors due to the economic crisis the Caribbean island is going through, its chief promoter, Luis Cruz, announced Monday.

Despite the fact that 5,044 short films from 124 countries have been entered for this year’s edition, Cruz said the festival organization ended last year “with its essential resources diminished,” on both the economic and human levels, a situation he attributed to the island’s financial crisis.

In his opinion, it is not worthwhile “copying the government’s habit of borrowing money without having ways to repay it,” which is why “we had to take the painful decision of postponing this year’s edition, at a time when Cinefiesta had become a model for other festivals on our island and on the continent.”

“We were hoping up to the last day of our meeting at which we took this painful decision that a final marketing effort would produce the funding needed to present Cinefiesta 2016. Unfortunately that never happened,” he said.

The organization has decided “to wait for better times as a show of respect” for its members on the Board of Directors and the rest of the people who work every year to carry out this cinematic event.

“Accumulating debt would have dimmed the festival’s reputation and put pressure on the organizers’ finances,” he said.

Cruz’s decision comes a day after the island’s Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla announced a unilateral moratorium on the payment of the $422 million that he should have paid Sunday to creditors of the Government Development Bank, or BGF, the financial unit of the executive branch.

Though in past months he kept from paying some of the debt as it came due, this Sunday’s announcement was the first massive default in the history of this Caribbean island. EFE