Stacey Brandhorst, a venture capitalist from the United States, has traveled around Latin America counseling, and aspiring businesspeople. However, she claims that communist-run Cuba has made her work a bit difficult.
She recently addressed a party with an estimated count of 50 Cubans in a hotel conference room in Havana that “Being an entrepreneur is one thing, but (being one) in Cuba is entirely another.”
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Last week, the U.S. Embassy in Havana announced a series of in-person seminars that it claims would provide advice to Cuban entrepreneurs wishing to launch and manage their own enterprises. The audience chuckled when Brandhorst, a business advisor from Oklahoma, opened the sessions.
The workshops, while limited in scope, are the latest sign of U.S. policy the Biden administration says is intended to support the Cuban people and private sector on an island that decades ago ditched capitalism for a Soviet-style planned economy dominated by a state-run enterprise.
The initiative comes in response to the Cuban government’s decision in 2021 to eliminate a restriction on private businesses that had been in effect since shortly after Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. An updated Economy Ministry list from March 23 shows that since then, upwards of 7,000 such enterprises have started.
According to the Communist Party of Cuba, these businesses—which include anything from restaurants to plumbing companies—now employ 14% of Cuba’s 4 million people.
The top American ambassador in Cuba, Benjamin Ziff, told Reuters that private business might pick up the slack in an economy that may be facing its toughest crisis since Castro’s revolution.
Ziff stated in an interview that “Cuba’s state-run economy has traditionally not delivered, and recently has delivered even less.” He added, “We want a Cuba that’s democratic, free, and prosperous. The prosperous part depends greatly on the private sector.”
Such programs, however, are controversial in Havana, where authorities frequently accuse the American embassy of interfering in an attempt to topple the regime.
Ahead of recent elections in Cuba on March 26, President Miguel Diaz-Canel declared that the United States “is betting that the private sector, as it grows, will become a faction that opposes the Revolution.” He added, “And we won’t let that happen.”
The United States, which claims to conduct its business in Cuba “transparently,” is not the only country attempting to support Cuba’s budding private sector.
Similar seminars for entrepreneur training were held on the island last month by the Swedish assistance organization and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Recently, China and Russia each presented their respective plans for expanding the private sector.
Despite the fact that thousands of small enterprises have received licenses in Cuba over the past two years, many have had difficulty expanding, according to interviews and publications in state-run media.
Entrepreneurs bemoan the bureaucracy and difficulties they face in finding raw materials and getting financing in a nation where almost everything is in limited supply.
According to a report in the regional state-run media source Adelante, 68 percent of the 181 permitted private firms in Camaguey, in eastern Cuba, have not yet started producing as of November 2022.
An electrician who attended a recent U.S. embassy workshop, Camilo Condis, claimed his company faced obstacles from both within and outside of Cuba.
In an interview, Condis stated, “We need the government of the United States to try to find a way to exempt the private sector from sanctions that are gravely affecting us.”
The ongoing U.S. embargo from the Cold War makes it difficult to conduct banking and financial operations with Cuba as well as to import and export products.
According to diplomat Ziff, the US is looking for methods to lessen the impact of its economic restrictions on private companies without unintentionally helping the Cuban regime.
He noted that the team is working towards this goal. He further added, striving toward that, he said. “I don’t know that is something we have achieved completely yet, but it is certainly something that we are trying to do.”
Ziff argued that the Cuban government should stop interfering with the private sector.
The Cuban government, according to Ziff, is the main barrier to conducting business there. He noted that regardless of the size of the Cuban-owned companies the policies in play are viewed as a “Band-Aid on a much larger wound”.
Cuban businesspeople who attended the session last week opted to concentrate on the practical rather than the political: how to create a business strategy, where to place advertisements, how to deal with limited resources and skyrocketing inflation, etc.
Politics are not important to Brandhorst, a savvy entrepreneur who has assisted several others in starting their own businesses.
Brandhorst concluded, “Every business anywhere in the world faces restrictions and constraints of some type.” Adding that, “In entrepreneurship, where there’s a will there’s a way.”
