{"id":252189,"date":"2022-05-01T08:31:29","date_gmt":"2022-05-01T12:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=252189"},"modified":"2022-05-01T08:31:29","modified_gmt":"2022-05-01T12:31:29","slug":"pymelab-2022-event-on-msmes-in-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/pymelab-2022-event-on-msmes-in-cuba\/","title":{"rendered":"Pymelab 2022: event on MSMEs in Cuba"},"content":{"rendered":"

A little over a year ago, talking about <\/span>micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs)<\/span><\/a> in Cuba was still a dream. As recently as December 2020, when the <\/span>first edition of the Pymelab event<\/span><\/a> was held in Havana, the regulations authorizing their creation had not yet been approved, although the possibility had already been officially handled and many people, both in the private sector and in the state and academic environment, advocated for their necessary legalization and insertion in the economic fabric of the island.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sixteen months later, at the time of the second edition of the meeting \u2014 organized by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Belgium in Cuba, the hub.brussels agency and the Cuban Ministry of Economy and Planning (MEP), in collaboration with the Delegation of the European Union (EU) and AUGE SRL \u2015 the reality is different. Since the <\/span>authorization of the first 35 Cuban MSMEs<\/span><\/a> last September, <\/span>there are already more than 3,000<\/span><\/a> of these new economic actors, most of them private (3,093), to which are added 51 state-owned, and 50 non-agricultural cooperatives (CNA), according to data updated this Thursday. Of them, 56% correspond to reconversions of pre-existing businesses, 114 are part of local development projects, while construction, services, food production and the manufacturing sector are currently leading the way in their conformation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not everything is running smoothly. Quite a few contradictions and difficulties persist that hinder the process, some of them derived from the very complex Cuban economic context \u2015 spurred on by the impact of the pandemic and the U.S. sanctions, and also by flaws in the design and implementation of the economic reforms, which have caused, among other things, <\/span>high inflation <\/span><\/a>\u2015 while another part is the consequence of internal obstacles \u2015 mental, bureaucratic, regulatory \u2015 that emerge as the process advances, as part of the adaptation and learning process that this supposes for all the actors involved in it, and also of tensions, ways of thinking and insufficiencies rooted for decades in the Cuban economic and institutional system.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pymelab pointed to all this in December 2020, as a wake-up call about the challenges that this opening could face once it began on the island, and it pointed to it again now, in its new edition held this Thursday at the Iberostar Grand Packard Hotel in the Cuban capital. The meeting, which was attended by Jean-Jacques Bastien and Isabel Brilhante Pedrosa, ambassadors of Belgium and the EU in Cuba, respectively, and Johana Odriozola, deputy minister of the MEP \u2015 who were in charge of the opening remarks \u2015, as well as by other authorities, diplomats, private and state businesspeople, representatives of banking institutions and experts; it was once again a space for the presentation of positive experiences \u2015 such as those of the <\/span>Belgian Citydev SME<\/span><\/a> and the Cuban <\/span>EMSI FARMA<\/span><\/a> \u2015, and had among its special moments the announcement by the Belgian <\/span>Oddo<\/span><\/a>, a world leader in business management systems, of free access for Cuba to its online platform with all its tools and modules, as a way to support the management of the new economic actors on the island.<\/span><\/p>\n