How Cuba Is Using Capitalism to Save Socialism
How Cuba Is Using Capitalism to Save Socialism
There is going to be more interaction with Cuba’s private sector, which was not allowed before. “But the proof will be in the pudding,” comments AS/COA’s Alana Tummino.
This is the second in a series of four dispatches this week on the US-Cuba opening. Read the first here.
HAVANA, CUBA—If you are fantasizing about your first trip to Cuba, that fantasy presumably includes cruising down the Malecón, Havana’s seaside promenade, in an open-topped 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air, with the tropical light playing over the decrepit buildings and the warm sea breeze tickling your scalp. Cigars are probably involved, and rum.
The rum and cigars are produced by state-managed Cuban enterprises. But who is maintaining the classic cars? In many cases, not the Cuban government, but self-employed entrepreneurs.
Allowing limited private enterprise within its socialist economy was how Cuba weathered the collapse of the Soviet Union while still under the US embargo. And now that Cuba-US relations are warming, that nascent private sector is proving a surprisingly fertile common ground for the two governments—albeit for rather different motives.....
“Cuban entrepreneurs are very excited about this new policy opening from the US side,” Alana Tummino, who runs the Cuba working group at the Americas Society/Council for the Americas, told Quartz. “There is going to be more space to interact directly with this private sector in Cuba, importing and exporting with them that was not allowed before. But the proof will be in the pudding....”
