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.

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?