MIAMI, United States. — The Cuba Siglo 21 platform announced the result of a investigation about “the deliberate policy of suffocation” unleashed by GAESA against the Cuban non-state sector (self-employed) since 2016.
The report “Entrepreneurship in Cuba suffocated by GAESA” addresses, among other issues, the maneuver of the Cuban regime behind the creation of small and medium-sized enterprises (Mipymes) while keeping more than 1,000 political prisoners in jail and supports Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.
The research, published in the Dossier Cuba 21 collection, was carried out with the support of the Havana Consulting Group, the Cuban Citizen Audit Observatory and the contributions of a group of independent journalists. It shows statistically that the greatest boom achieved by the non-state sector occurred in the period 2013-2016, when, in full thaw, the Cuban regime blocked the reforms and began a ruthless offensive to stop the largest movement of citizen entrepreneurship that occurred in the last six decades.
According to the data, far from encouraging greater economic opening, the so-called “thaw” generated the opposite: “the oligarchy began a state offensive to suffocate entrepreneurs.”
Cuba Siglo 21 highlights that “this offensive coincided, still under the Obama Administration, with the first complaints by those affected by the so-called Havana Syndrome.”
“The oligarchy benefited financially from the Thaw, cleared its foreign debt by forgiving 42 billion dollars, obtained new lines of credit, increased the flow of tourists, and used the resources to build hotels and purchase equipment for the repression. When the epidemic came, there were no oxygen cylinders, ambulances or hospitals prepared to deal with it. They did not stop the construction of hotels. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans died,” says the investigation.
From 2016 to date Cuba “has lost two thirds of this labor force because the State, which now boasts of creating MSMEs that do not represent 1% of those businesses, since then applied deliberate policies to repress them through prosecutors and police ( the most successful often ended up in jail). A considerable part has emigrated convinced that there is no future”.
Cuba Siglo 21’s investigation reveals that the new Mipymes law was designed to redirect state-owned companies in order to create a business structure mostly run by oligarchs and government-affiliated individuals. The platform expands that “the objective is to facilitate the promotion in the United States of a thaw 2.0 creating a false openness image to attract foreign investment and circumvent the US embargo”.
The report also shows that Cuba “is a country where there is still no business freedom to register the ownership of a company, where you cannot freely export or import, or expand a business, or decide where to invest.”
