I feel useful; I’m independent,” said Ms. Álvarez, who opened a small cafe in November at her home in this scruffy town 25 miles from the capital, Havana. “When you sit down at the end of the day and look at how much you have made, you feel satisfied.”Many issues though, or course. Lots of complaints about the extensive oversight of small businesses, or better said, Cuba-style regulation. And given the sad state of the Cuban economy, no guarantee the market will support the culture of entrepreneurship. Most serious however, is the lack of a wholesale market. There simply are no materials available to run a small business, and while the government says it will set up a wholesale market, that could take years.
Eagerly, warily, Cubans are taking up the government’s offer to work for themselves, selling coffee in their front yards, renting out houses, making rattan furniture and hawking everything from bootleg DVDs to Silly Bandz and homemade wine.
“It’s absurd that they will give you a license to work but they won’t give you access to materials,” Mr. Chávez said. “Cuba is falling apart,” he added, gesturing to the crumbling buildings nearby. “We could help rebuild it.”When my mother went back to Cuba in 2002, she was most shocked by two things: that there was nothing worth buying -- unless you are in the market for an endless variety of t-shirts emblazoned with a picture of Che, and how bad the food tasted, essentially because of the lack of high-quality feed necessary to raise good tasting meat and pork.
Indeed, the place is falling apart, and a personal stake here-and-there in rebuilding the country could do wonders for a population that at present has little (if any) national pride. And, if things ever were to change in Cuba, we will need a country full of people with the basic skills learned by doing such things as starting and running a small business venture.
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