How is it possible that agriculture’s participation in investment is more than ten times less than investment in the real estate sector?

There is nothing better than success to attract the attention, the suspicions, the concerns of the bureaucracy and the fear of the defenders of the status quo, those here and those there.

If all this that is happening and will happen was the result of not having done anything in recent years, then it would be easier to understand. But it’s not like that.

You don’t move into the future by repeating failed schemes and hoping they give a different result.

It is necessary to assume the costs of getting out of debt under the conditions in which our economy and our society are.

Having good institutions is not about having good buildings with many disciplined and obedient homo sapiens, equipped with modern technological instruments, willing to defend their status tooth and nail.

It is said and repeated easily until it becomes a slogan. However, the country's macroeconomic and productive conditions help little in this regard.

Is it economically sustainable to continue growing in new rooms, when the occupancy rate of the existing ones in the best years of tourist arrivals barely reached 60%?

Agricultural production has been and is one of the great weaknesses of the Cuban economy. It was even so in the years in which it received enormous resources.

Inflation has shattered the purchasing power of the income (not only the salary) of the average Cuban and has turned basic necessities into “sumptuary goods.”

A year and a half after their birth it would seem that their success may be their doom. As on other occasions, prejudices have been gaining ground.

Those who are dedicated to the hospitality sector in Cuba, in the state or private sector, do not find it easy in the current conditions in which even tissue paper is scarce.

Money is trust on paper, says Ferguson. The bank can only function as such because of the trust that people and companies have in them.

Economist and OnCuba columnist Juan Triana Cordoví agreed to answer questions about the evolution of SMEs on the island.

More questions: Are there already many MSMEs? Where does “the state” stand? Have they been successful or is it just “propaganda”? And what if their owners get rich?

Should we continue dragging on the business culture of the 20th century and its prejudices?

We have more rooms than ever before, but we don’t have enough tourists... why?

The society in which we live today has notable differences with that other in which the Economic and Social Guidelines were discussed, enriched, modified and finally approved.

The business system, ours, is both the stone and the foot that trips over the rest of the other stones.

SMEs, local development projects, industrial and service cooperatives have introduced new dynamics, still insufficient it is true, but that displace the limits of the comfort zone of the organizations in charge of directing the economy, so accustomed to verticality.

It has not been for lack of measures that the Cuban agricultural sector has not reached its goals, what happens then for the sector’s debt to the people’s aspirations, far from diminishing, continues to increase?

If we have allowed garage sales that are generally not garage sales, why then do we not encourage the emergence of private businesses for full-fledged retail sales?

No other sector has been able to do what the sugarcane industry did.

It is essential to deepen the reforms where reality has shown that what has been done is not enough. Delaying that deepening is not healthy, as we know.

It is much easier to explain the capacity of our production system to obtain a product as sophisticated as a vaccine, than to explain its inability to produce pigs, or sugar, or hens to fatten, or sweet potatoes, or corn.