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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
National and international media outlets highlighted the Cuba Study Group‘s April 7 release of a white paper in collaboration with Americas Society/Council of the Americas and the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
The white paper, “Supporting Small Business in Cuba: Recommendations for Private and Public Sector Leaders,” was released just before the Communist Party of Cuba’s sixth congress.
The paper outlines specific steps the Cuban government, the US government and private sector, NGO and foundation leaders can take to support micro and small businesses in Cuba.
Media coverage in English extended to several articles:
“Experts Seek to Help Cuban Entrepreneurs” – AP, Laura Wides-Muñoz, 7/4/2011
> Posted by Center Staff
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Contact: Tomas Bilbao
(202) 714-1153
IN ANTICIPATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY CONGRESS IN CUBA, REPORT OFFERS RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HOW CUBA AND U.S. REGULATIONS CAN BETTER SUPPORT INDEPENDENT SMALL AND MICRO ENTERPRISE IN THE ISLAND
Washington, DC — The Cuba Study Group today released a white paper in collaboration with Americas Society/Council of the Americas and the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International entitled: “Supporting Small Business in Cuba: Recommendations for Private and Public Sector Leaders.” The report is being released just days before the Communist Party of Cuba celebrates its sixth congress — its first in 13 years — and outlines specific steps the Cuban government, the U.S. government and private sector, NGO and foundation leaders can take to support micro and small businesses in Cuba.
“Cuban leaders have taken positive initial steps to expand independent micro and small businesses on the island, but if this nascent sector is going to play an important role in Cuba’s economic recovery, then Cuban leaders must take additional substantive steps to create a regulatory environment where they can succeed,” said Carlos Saladrigas, co-chairman of the Cuba Study Group. 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 »
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