CubaTrade-April2017-FLIPBOOK

editors note
Building Business
from the Opening
Anyone who says that U.S. engagement
since 2014 has not benefitted the people of
Cuba need only take a trip to the island
One of our tasks at Cuba Trade is to track the daily media reports
from around the country about Cuba. By and large, they tend
to favor engagement; most are about the positive feedback from
educational, cultural or business missions to the island; many are
about the benefits of opening Cuban markets to U.S. products;
others describe the experiences of ordinary citizens visiting Cuba
from cities across the U.S.
There remains, however, a strident minority of publications
and journalists who believe that we should not engage with
Cuba. Among their assertions is that the opening, as such, has
only served to put more money into government coffers, and
that the average Cuban has not benefitted in any way from the
rapprochement with America.
The authors of these stories have clearly not traveled to
Cuba. If they had done so, they would have seen the phenomenon
of an emerging world of small, private businesses. These
include the half million licensed cuentapropistas who can create
their own businesses in everything from a barber shop to a bakery
to a computer repair outlet.
If you visit Havana and other cities in Cuba, you can witness
the emergence of this fledgling entrepreneurial class. Shopkeepers.
Tour guides. Software companies. Bed-and-breakfasts. And if
you inquire as to where these small businesses go for funding, you
will find that many are being financed by Cuban Americans who
can now send or bring cash to their friends and relatives, thanks
to the openings.
Many of the stories in this issue reflect this new reality. In a
story by economist Emilio Morales, you can see how President
Obama’s relaxation on limits for remittances of cash and goods
has resulted in record influxes, cash and goods being used to build
private businesses.
Also in our feature well, we take a look at several types of
emerging small businesses. The first is about how private programmers
are starting to blossom. Next, we have a feature about
how ordinary citizens are turning their homes into accommodations
for visitors, many of them Americans,
When I started to edit this publication, a veteran Cuba
watcher told me that the reason anti-engagement Congressmen
opposed regular flights to Cuba was because then people would
see what the reality was all about. At the time, I thought that was
absurd. Now I think differently. H
J.P. Faber. Editor-in-Chief
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10 CUBATRADE APRIL 2017
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