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.

Aligning regulations and regulators with the purpose will be an ongoing task if old persistent obstacles are to be removed and new ones are prevented from emerging.

Implementing an adjustment policy and pretending not to pay a cost for it seems to be at odds with reality itself.

There are good norms and regulations that get old because “circumstances changed” and they remained unchanged.

They have the responsibility of ensuring that our socialist enterprises truly achieve a decisive role in the country.

We are able to combat the exodus of qualified personnel by providing opportunities that don’t cost much. Are we taking advantage of this?

Having foreign currency is a growing need for the national economy, among other things because the weakness of its productive system has made it increasingly dependent on imports.

Wouldn’t this be the time to resolve the same problems with other solutions?

Our bread depends on wheat imports. Until very recently, I thought it was impossible to produce wheat in Cuba, then I found out that it wasn’t so.

To expect to obtain massive and immediate positive impacts from the “Task of Reorganization” would be to ignore the reality under which it is being carried out.

Cutting down on bureaucracy’s interference in the entire self-employment project approval process is essential. Not making it depend on the “personal considerations” of an official or his “interests” is decisive.

Although it seemed that the list of activities not allowed as a modality of self-employment in Cuba looked faraway like the horizon, today we can practically reach it with our fingertips. In short, when the regulations in this regard are published, it will be known how much the Cuban business fabric can be diversified and effectively enriched under current conditions. The history of self-employment has been with us since the late 1970s, when the first resolution that allowed such activity was issued as part of the “rectification of errors” announced in the Programmatic Platform of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). This document was the foundation that anticipated the first of all the PCC congresses. This story has been told over and over again for decades, especially since the 1990s, from multiple perspectives,1 with greater or lesser depth, from quite different and sometimes irreconcilable political and ideological positions: from the almost absolute naivety of understanding the event as “the solution” to the country’s problems to the one that has identified it as part of the problems and dangers, and even as the confirmation of the distancing of official policy from the essential foundations of the Revolution. The U.S. administrations, especially...