These enterprises have been useful in sharing the blame for the problems in the Cuban economy, just as hurricanes or droughts have sometimes done.

It is insisted that this is not a war against SMEs; however, the measures announced and admitted by those who claim it indicate the opposite.

We will enter the second half of 2024 with policies that limit and hinder the growth of the country’s business fabric.

If the labor pains to get the MSMEs to be born in Cuba were intense, it seems that the postpartum pains are just as acute.

Runaway inflation affects everyone, but fundamentally those with lower incomes, retirees, pensioners and a great many wage earners.

When today we debate the different actors in our economy, the experience of the Open Farmers’ Market and the Agricultural Markets of the 1990s helps us understand what we should not do.

Do we Cubans actually live in a war economy? There are facts that indicate otherwise.

Being “truly independent” will only be possible if a considerable part of the effort to grow and develop remains in the hands of our citizens.

The economic reform begun in the 1990s has never really been completed. The resistance has brought us to the depth of the crisis that Cuba suffers today.

More than a month and a half later, the program that will implement the changes in the economy announced in December is still not public.

While on one side and the other the extremes compete to discredit MSMEs, Cuban entrepreneurs create value, try to accommodate regulations that do not facilitate their activity in a sui generis market.

Of the measures announced to date, those that raise prices and rates will also contribute to the rise of inflation, the increase in dollarization and a greater devaluation of the Cuban peso.

Along with an undersupplied, inefficient and expensive state commerce network, another network of small private grocer’s and hardware stores has grown in all the neighborhoods.

Based on the information available on the different sectors of the economy, it can be anticipated that the goal of 3% GDP growth in 2023 will be difficult to achieve.

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.”