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Guest blogger Tomas Bilbao is Executive Director of the Cuba Study Group with which the Center for Financial Inclusion has collaborated. Bilbao shares his strongly held views on how efforts to reverse positive policy changes announced by the Obama Administration in April of 2009 would hurt the budding entrepreneurial class in Cuba and would represent an obstacle to needed change.
For over 50 years, US policy toward Cuba has had the single aim of isolating Cuba from the outside world and forcing the collapse of the island nation’s economy in hopes of bringing about regime change. Other than a small, vocal group in Miami and Washington, the rest of the world now acknowledges the obvious truth that US policy has been a categorical failure. It is less often recognized, however, that US policy may actually have made change on the island less likely. An amendment last week proposed by Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a longtime defender of the status quo in US policy toward Cuba, is the most recent evidence of this fact.
Last week, Rep. Diaz-Balart introduced an amendment to the FY2012 appropriations bill, which, if signed into law, would roll back the positive steps taken by President Obama to allow Cuban-Americans to travel and send money to their families in Cuba. “The changes [implemented by the Obama Administration] have been the largest source of revenue of [Castro’s] dictatorship,” stated Rep. Diaz-Balart. Rep. Diaz-Balart’s statement to the Miami Herald reflects a profound disconnect with the realities on the ground inside Cuba as well as human disconnect regarding the impact of these policies on Cuban families both on the island and in the diaspora. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Center Staff
The Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), in conjunction with the Cuba Study Group, in January sponsored the “Cuba Small Business Summit.”
Participants in the event, which was hosted by the Council of the Americas in New York, examined questions that included: “Could remittances from the US play a key role in providing finance to Cuban new start-up enterprises, in the absence of private or public banks in a position to lend?”
The Miami Herald this week published an op-ed by Sergio Bendixen and Donald Terry that fleshes out the answer to that question.
Bendixen is a founding partner of Bendixen and Amandi International; Terry is former general manager at the InterAmerican Development Bank and current lecturer at Boston University Law School and consultant with the World Bank in Africa. Terry is also a member of CFI’s advisory and faculty councils.
Highlights of the piece, “Remittances and Cuba,” include:
“A commitment from the Cuban government to allow all remittances to enter the Cuban economy freely, unburdened by taxes or other cumbersome regulations, could result in remittances reaching $2 billion to Cuba in the coming years.” Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Josh Goldstein, aka Mr. Provocative
With up to one million state workers moving off the government payroll in the next year, President Raúl Castro and the Cuban leadership seem committed to strengthening the microenterprise and small business sector—with self-employment now the certain future of so many Cuban workers. Could remittances from the United States play a key role in providing finance to these new start-up enterprises, in the absence of private or public banks in a position to lend?
On January 19th, the Center for Financial Inclusion, in conjunction with the Cuba Study Group sponsored the “Cuba Small Business Summit,” which was hosted by the Council of the Americas, at its headquarters in New York. The summit focused on the outlook for profound change in the employment picture in Cuba in the wake of a new commitment to economic reform announced in September 2010 by the Cuban government. One question was on everyone’s mind. Were the newly enacted economic reforms beginning to make a difference in the lives of ordinary Cubans? Read the rest of this entry »
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