Entrepreneurial Reform, Market Expansion, and Political Engagement: Risks and Opportunities for Cuba Today

Abstract

After consolidating his new government once becoming president in 2008, Raúl Castro made a series of unprecedented moves in late 2010 to encourage the re-emergence of private self-employment (known as trabajo por cuenta propia or cuentapropismo)—explicitly reversing Fidel Castro’s policy that, according to Raúl’s own bold assessment, had “stigmatized” and even “demonized” it (Castro Ruz 2010b). Subsequently, the number of legally allowed private occupations grew from 178 to 201, and the number of Cuba’s cuentapropistas (self-employed workers or micro-entrepreneurs) more than tripled, from less than 150,000 in 2010 to more than a half-million by mid 2015. Additionally, hundreds of new nonagricultural cooperatives have been authorized to operate since their legalization in 2012. Moreover, on December 17, 2014, as part of a momentous diplomatic thaw between Washington and Havana, the Obama Administration announced a new policy of engagement targeted explicitly at “empowering” Cuba’s new class of private entrepreneurs by allowing US companies to trade with “the emerging Cuban private sector.”¹