Cuba opens door to most small enterprise initiatives

By Marc Frank

© Reuters/ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI
FILE Picture: Coronavirus condition (COVID-19) outbreak in Havana

HAVANA (Reuters) – In a major reform of the point out-dominated economic system, the Cuban governing administration will enable little private companies to function in most fields, doing away with its minimal checklist of routines, condition-operate media claimed on Saturday.

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The measure, coming as the Caribbean island seeks to get well from an economic slump, will expand the discipline from 127 activities to more than 2,000, Labor Minister Marta Elena Feito Cabrera was quoted as declaring. She spoke at a council of ministers assembly that approved the policy.

She stated there would be 124 exceptions, but the media studies presented no information.

Reform-minded Cuban economists have extensive identified as for the part of small business enterprise to be expanded to assistance bounce-begin the economy and to generate careers.

The economy has stagnated for decades and contracted by 11% very last calendar year, because of to a blend of the coronavirus pandemic that devastated tourism and tricky U.S. sanctions. Cubans have been working with a scarcity of standard items and infinite lines to attain them.

The crisis has forced a series of prolonged promised but stalled reforms, from devaluation of the peso and reorganization of the financial system to some deregulation of point out firms and international financial commitment.

“The self-utilized are not going to have it quick in this new starting because of to the advanced setting in which they will operate, with several dollars and inputs in the economy,” mentioned Pavel Vidal, a previous Cuban central lender economist who teaches at Colombia’s Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali.

“But with the ingenuity of the Cuban and the sophistication of the parallel industry, they will be in a position to just take off tiny by very little,” he additional.

President Miguel Diaz-Canel stated very last yr the region confronted an worldwide and regional disaster and would carry out a collection of reforms to raise exports, minimize imports and stimulate domestic desire.

He claimed the steps would incorporate “the improvement of the non-state sector, with quick priority in the enlargement of self-work and elimination of obstructions.”

The non-condition sector – not such as agriculture with its hundreds of countless numbers of compact farms, hundreds of cooperative and working day laborers – is composed largely of modest private enterprises and cooperatives their personnel, artisans, taxi drivers and tradesmen.

The labor minister mentioned there were being a lot more than 600,000 people today in the sector, some 13% of the labor power. They are all specified as self-employed and an approximated 40% depend mainly on the tourism sector or work in community transportation.

More than the very last six months the governing administration has also moved to grant little organizations accessibility to wholesale markets and to import and export, nevertheless only as a result of state providers.

(Reporting by Marc Frank Enhancing by Frances Kerry and Andrea Ricci)