Private companies, anathema in Cuba for more than 60 years, have become, from one day to the next, a lifeline for the regime and a new source of friction with Washington.
In some unusual statements, this Thursday, johana tabladadeputy director general for the United States of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, boasted that the private sector “emerges and develops under the protection of the policies of the Cuban Revolution, discussed and approved by the citizenry.”
He post from the official’s Facebook page –recognized by Prensa Latina agency–, alluded, without saying it specifically, to a tweet two days ago from the US Embassy in Havana, which promoted an extensive report on micro, small and medium-sized companies on its networks (MSMEs) in Cuba posted last week by The Miami Herald.
The link was accompanied of the message: “There is significant growth in the private sector in Cuba! The private sector is on track to buy more than a billion dollars in goods by the end of 2023. Companies that work independently and creatively promote economic and social development on the Island “.
On the same subject, and also this Thursday, the WLRN medium, from South Florida, dedicates a chronicle to the incipient cuban businessmenwhich titles Cuban capitalism is coming true. The Cuban capitalists hope that US aid will be just as real. In it, the author highlights: “Cuba’s communist economy is sinking, but its capitalist entrepreneurs are growing, and the United States wants to partner with them before Russia.”
Tablada attacked the United States for “the illegal coercive measures of intensified blockade that hinder income, banking transactions, trade and investments and that torture the Cuban population”
Faced with this, Tablada attacked the United States for “the illegal coercive measures of intensified blockade that hinder income, banking transactions, trade and investments and that torture the Cuban population” and for “the financial siege and persecution for fraudulent inclusion of Cuba in the terrorist list.
Those journalistic notes, however, not only drove the Ministry of Foreign Relations mad, but also part of the exiles, who see the proliferation of new private companies on the Island as a “fraud change,” as he harshly put it. Rosa Maria Paya.
For her part, businesswoman and activist Saily González responded with a long thread to the “several inaccuracies” and “some fallacies” in which, in his opinion, the report of the Herald. “A country in transition? Where to? Towards an economic model similar to the Russian oligarchy, I suppose,” he tweeted, adding one of the sentences from the report and alluding to the growing fear of an opening of the Cuban economy. to the russiangiven the latest agreements between Havana and Moscow.
Within the Island, as this newspaper has verified, the distrust towards these new businesses comes from for the high prices and for the fear that they will be managed by people close to the regime.
Interviewed about it by the Herald, the Catholic activist Dagoberto Valdés, founder of the magazine Coexistence, He declared that although he understands that “the economic actors closest to the circle of power” may be the ones that reach the “candy” in a “piñata effect”, he qualifies that it is “mathematically impossible” that the almost 8,000 private companies “are run by relatives of government officials.”
This “piñata” was also referred to by Reinaldo Escobar, editor-in-chief of 14ymedio, in the gathering of Radio Martí The News as It Is, when saying that private companies have been “kidnapped” by those in charge, “in a very easy way: since they have all the power, they are the ones who say who is and who is not, who is allowed something and who is allowed the other”. However, right there he recalled that it was “a conquest of people who are critical of the Government” and a demand “that did not come from above, but from below.”
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