Cuban tourism entrepreneur lining up Plan B
HAVANA — Julio Alvarez Torres started business with a single refurbished 1955 Chevy Bel Air that had been in his family for decades and put it into service in 2010 driving tourists around the city.
They liked the feeling of going back in time, and Alvarez and other cuentapropistas — selfemployed entrepreneurs — liked the fact that the pointy fins, heavy chrome and streamlined hood ornaments of 1950s cars could be put to work to earn them a living.
Cuba has allowed limited selfemployment since the early ’90s, but in 2010 when the government began emphasizing selfemployment as a way to cut bloated state payrolls, the old cars became a hot commodity.
Now lines of big-finned beauties, 1950s convertibles and twotone models buffed to a gleaming shine wait outside the Hotel Nacional and other Havana tourist hotels to take visitors for spins along the Malecon, pick them up or drop them at the airport or ferry them to attractions and business appointments.
Alvarez and his wife Nidialys Acosta oversee a fleet of 22 classic private cars and drivers that form a loose association called NostalgiCar. Alvarez also has started an off-shoot called Garaje NostalgiCar, a garage that refurbishes vintage cars and employs eight workers. He calls the garage, which has refurbished his own cars and those of others, his Plan B.
Alvarez says he’s constantly in touch with the government about possibly turning NostalgiCar into a cooperative. Many formerly state-run beauty salons, barbershops and other service companies have been turned over to their workers who run them independently on a profit-and-loss basis as the government continues working to pare state payrolls.
But so far he hasn’t gotten a positive response, so each driver/owner is an individual cuentapropista.
“Today we’re not a company or a cooperative,” Alvarez said. “There’s not the legal framework to do what we want.” But he’s content to leave the structure of the garage as it is because he said he doesn’t think the employees are prepared to become his partners, and so far all the investment has been his capital.
Under the new U.S. regulations, Alvarez and other private Cuban entrepreneurs like him may eventually be able to directly import the parts needed to keep his cars running, rather than using a South Florida middleman, said Miami attorney Augusto Maxwell.
“Theoretically any American business should be allowed to export to a private Cuban business person, but most U.S. companies aren’t familiar with how to do it,” he said. “It’s interesting to see the forces of private enterprise begin to work in Cuba and it will be interesting to see how they manage it.”
The big missing ingredient for Cuba’s self-employed workforce, which now numbers nearly 500,000, is the lack of a meaningful wholesale market on the island.
“If we can’t figure out how to get access to a wholesale market, I don’t think we’ll grow much larger,” Alvarez said.