Nearly 200 entities, including state companies and new actors of the Cuban economyparticipated this week in Havana in the First Business Round of the local business community with tourism, according to official sources.
The event, held at the Marcelo Salado Local Development Project (PDL), in the Havana municipality of Playa, had the objective of “promoting a meeting of tourism and its different companies, chains, tour operators, and non-hotel entities of the capital with the local business”, as previously stated Luis Carlos Góngora, general director of International Relations and Foreign Trade of the Government of the Cuban capital.
The intention of this contact between companies in the tourism sector and other economic actors was “to visualize possible suppliers for the national tourism industry, substitute imports that they carry out, link up and link some productive forms of these with the work of hotels,” Góngora added. .
Consequently, 190 entities participated, in accordance with newspaper data Tribune of Havanastate companies, MSMEs, cooperatives and local development projects, as well as self-employed workers, who showed their products and services, in areas such as food production, technical systems, construction, decoration, lingerie, preparation of rooms, and others that could be offered in shops and the non-hotel network of tourism.
Authorities from the sector who attended the event highlighted the “diversity, potential and opportunities” offered by the meeting, and pointed out the importance of creating “agreements that really allow this business community to grow in its productive and commercial capacity and find in tourism, the recipient of that production, of those autochthonous products that tourism needs so much for its services and many of which today import from distant places and at a significant cost”, the report states.
Finally, as a result, 484 agreements were concluded in the initial phase and more than 2,400 business intentions, which involved 181 participating entities, refers Grandstand.
In this regard, María del Pilar Macías, general director of Operations and Quality of the Ministry of Tourism, described the business exchange as “the first step to achieve then specify, make contracts and carry out what was discussed with the more than 90 entities of tourism that participated.
The official assured that there is a willingness of her ministry to promote these agreements “because in addition to substituting an import, the money generated by tourism then spills over to the national economy and does not leave the country and that is one of the objectives of the tourism sector. tourism, develop the industry”, and invited attendees to participate in the International Tourism Fair, which in 2023 will be held in Havana.
Cuba account now with 5,547 new economic actors approved since the process began in September 2021. Of that total, 5,424 correspond to private MSMEs, 64 to state MSMEs, and 59 to non-agricultural cooperatives, according to data from the Ministry of Economy and Planning (MEP).
