MIAMI, United States. – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned this friday about the “new scheme” of fraud of the Cuban regime, which is based on “asking residents of the United States for investments in the ‘private sector'” of the Island.
“In Cuba, citizens do not have property rights and all companies are state-owned,” DeSantis recalled in the same tweet. “I have instructed the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity and Enterprise Florida Inc. [principal organización de desarrollo económico del estado] to alert Floridians and avoid falling for this scam,” he said.
Florida Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez also wrote on his Twitter account: “The same regime that robbed Cubans of their means of subsistence, like my parents, now desperately begs Americans to ‘invest’ in the Island.”
“This scheme is nothing more than a scam that deceives only supporters of the Biden administration,” he concluded.
In this way, both DeSantis and Nuñez seem to respond to the recent intervention of the Cuban Minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment, Rodrigo Malmierca, in one of the sessions of the National Assembly of People’s Power.
This Wednesday, Malmierca suggested that the Cuban government was studying the possibility of allowing the intervention of foreign capital in “individual” businesses.
During a meeting of the Parliament’s Economic Affairs Commission, Malmierca pointed out that the current commitment is aimed at, preferably, promoting low-cost foreign investment with “the aspiration of doing business that contributes to municipal development,” according to a report of the state agency Prensa Latina.
According to the official, so far 57 projects involving a capital of 5,000 million dollars are under negotiation and could come into operation within a year.
Malmierca also specified that in the first half of this year nine businesses with foreign capital were approved, one of them in the Mariel Special Development Zone (ZEDM).
“They are mostly small, with a capital of around 20 million dollars,” he said. In addition, he added that they correspond to the Government’s priorities: food production, mining, industry, wholesale trade, construction, information technology and telecommunications, and biotechnology.
The official explained that aspects related to the participation of foreign capital in private businesses are also in the process of being defined, where some experiences could soon begin.
In this way, the island’s regime also takes advantage of the willingness of the Biden administration to support the alleged private Cuban businesses.
In the middle of last May, it transpired that the Biden administration would “explore” options to facilitate electronic payments and expand access to microfinance for Cuban entrepreneurs.
A week earlier, the US Government. had ordered the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC, for its acronym in English) to issue the first license that authorizes a US entity to invest capital in a private company registered and located in Cuba.
Despite these measures, experts continue to view investment in Cuba with suspicion. Last March, sociologist and entrepreneurship advisor Ángel Marcelo Rodríguez Pita said in an interview with Radio Television Marti that it was “very risky for a person to invest in the Cuban scenario.”
“Most of the national entrepreneurs are afraid due to the lack of a wholesale market. There are not all the guarantees, there are no special development zones that are really working, there is no public-private partnership. We also have problems with access to bank loans and investment from the national private sector is declining. The option most people take is to sell their properties and leave Cuba,” the expert concluded.
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