Cuba’s businesses look to Biden
Trump-era restrictions still squeeze economy
HAVANA – Business was booming for a trendy little clothing shop called Clandestina in the heart of Old Havana, one of thousands of new private businesses that had arisen in what was once a nearwholly state-run socialist economy.
A torrent of tourists poured through the doors to pick through bags, sweatshirts, camisoles and caps – at least until the Trump administration turned off the taps that had been opened just a few years before by then-President Barack Obama.
Today, those glass-and-wood doors swing open less often, with tourism choked both by U.S. sanctions meant to punish Cuba’s government and a pandemic that has squashed tourism almost everywhere.
With their business tottering, Clandestina’s owners – Idania Del Río and Leire Fernández – subsist on hope that new U.S. President Joe Biden will reverse at least some of the restrictions implemented by his predecessor.
“If Biden allows travel to Cuba, gives an image of Cuba as a friendly country ... that in itself is a radical change for the cash registers of entrepreneurs,” Fernández, 44, told The Associated Press.
In 2010, in an attempt to energize the island’s sluggish, top-down economy, then-President Raúl Castro promoted an unprecedentedly broad opening to the private sector, allowing hundreds of sorts of small businesses – restaurants, shoe repairers, small clothing workshops and more – that have grown to employ some 600,000 people.
Some of the most successful targeted a surging number of tourists – part of another government opening meant to save the economy.
Tourism grew as 2014 ended and Obama announced a historic thaw of relations with Cuba, arguing that five decades of U.S. sanctions against communist governments had failed and that more vibrant ties would do more to help the Caribbean nation’s people.
Clandestina launched in 2015 about five blocks from the country’s capitol building – modeled on the one in Washington – just in time to fill its sails with the breeze from the U.S. opening.
“The store was small, we barely had anything and a lot of people began to show up,” Del Río, 39, told the AP. “A lot of Americans came, deals were signed.”
Quickly the shop was running out of
large-sized shirts bought by husky foreigners.
With U.S. interest in Cuba high, Clandestina’s clothes quickly became a hit, even appearing at New York fashion shows.
It even began to sell online – something unprecedented for a country where internet connectivity is limited even today.
“It was something very radical: all of a sudden a 100% Cuban brand in New York, being sold to North American citizens, to tourists, to everyone,” Del Río said.
In November 2018, U.S.-based Google featured the company in an open-air fashion show, “Country under Construction,” showing off rustic shirts, leather boots and overalls stamped with the “Wi-Fi” symbol in the courtyard of
Havana’s Museum of Fine Arts.
But the party was ending. The Trump administration had begun issuing a series of measures banning most trips by Americans and limiting money sent to the island.
It also slashed the number of U.S. diplomats, banned cruise ships and punished companies shipping the Venezuelan oil Cuba’s economy has relied upon.
The restrictions, imposed piece by piece, haven’t loosened the government’s control, but they have squeezed its budgets, and those of ordinary Cubans as well.
The government blames U.S. sanctions for widespread shortages of food and fuel and says they cost Cuba some $5.5 billion.
“Four very hard years have passed since Obama’s time,” said Fernández, who is Spanish and Del Río’s partner. She said that Clandestina lost 50% of its income after Trump’s initial travel restrictions.
And they’re not alone. A 2019 survey of 126 business owners published by Auge, a local business consultant, found that 80% reported being affected by Trump’s measures.
Biden has long said that he would reinstate at least some of Obama’s policies toward Cuba. His advisers have spoken of eliminating Trump-era restrictions on remittances sent by Cubans in the U.S. to their homeland, and on travel.
So far though, it’s not clear when such actions might come.
The Cuban leadership has lived through a series of openings and closings imposed by U.S. leaders since sanctions were first enacted some 60 years ago and tightened as Fidel Castro allied himself with the Soviet Bloc.
Even as the Department of Child Safety is sending March payments to foster parents and other caregivers, some are still waiting for their February payments. A few say they are still owed money from January.
Those delayed payments — for families that foster children or have adopted them from foster care — quickly emerged as the most acute problem in the rollout of Guardian, a new $86 million computer system that DCS debuted Feb. 1.
But they are not the only problem. An Arizona Republic review of state records shows that more than two weeks after the payment delays began, DCS told the state board that authorizes technology projects that Guardian was “working as expected” with “no interruptions at all.”
One official congratulated the agency on its successful rollout — even though by that time, some parents had been locked out and were left waiting for payment for two weeks, a delay that persisted into the next month.
And foster and adoptive parents were not the only ones affected, according to technology board records and interviews with parents:
The state’s foster care review boards can’t access case files in the new system, preventing them from doing their jobs and potentially slowing the progress of a child’s case in juvenile court.
Foster parents report that case managers can’t access Guardian to request parent aides, a claim DCS denies. The aides supervise visits between children in foster care and their biological parents, an important step in efforts to reunify families.
And at least one group-home manager said he is still waiting for his February payment, while others report payments arrived weeks late.
Access deliberately turned off
Guardian is an information-management system that houses demographic information on children in foster care, monitors where they are placed and authorizes the stipends paid to foster and kinship families, as well as the subsidies paid to adoptive and guardianship parents.
After Guardian went online Feb. 1, DCS said it turned off the portal that caregivers use to submit their invoices to “alleviate start-up traffic.” That delayed payments to caregivers in February, sparking complaints and confusion as DCS scrambled to find another way to send the monthly payments.
The agency has yet to explain why, if there was concern about start-up traffic snarling operations, it did not have a phased-in plan, or a backup plan in case some services were not available through Guardian.
Foster and kinship parents are paid a stipend of $19 a day per child; adoption and guardianship payments average $691 monthly. The payments are technically reimbursements, intended to cover care that was provided in the previous month.
Payment ‘barriers’ fixed
As March approached, DCS said it would send payments automatically, without first receiving the required invoice from foster and kinship parents, as it worked to open up access to Guardian. In a Feb. 27 letter to caregivers, DCS Director Mike Faust said most parents had been paid for that month.
“The remaining barriers preventing payment have been alleviated permitting outstanding payments to process early next week,” he wrote. He advised parents who had not received payments to call the agency’s “warm line” for help.
But some parents said they either can’t get through or have been told there’s nothing more to be done.
“They say ‘call,’ but I call and no one calls me back,” said Melissa Tracy, who has four adoptive children who qualify for the subsidy. Her February payment, which normally arrives in the first week of the month, showed up in the final week.
As of Friday, she had not yet received her March payment, although she was told to expect it by early next week at the latest.
Robert Lee has yet to receive any support for the grandchild he and his wife took into their home in late December. As kinship parents, they qualify for a monthly stipend of about $45.
“The monthly stipend is not great, but with a healthy little kid outgrowing clothes and in need of such items as a crib and such, it would take care of those expenses,” Lee said in an email to The Republic. Throw in diapers, he said, and the bills add up. Their grandson’s placement was sudden; the couple had a week’s notice, giving them little time to plan for the addition of an infant.
Foster parents such as Anika Robinson said parent aides have not been assigned for children who were recently put in foster care. The hold-up is an inability of case managers to make the assignment because of Guardian problems.
But in a statement Friday, DCS said that is not true, that “service functionality is operating properly” and aides are being assigned.
‘No interruptions at all’
A week after the Guardian system went online, Faust told caregivers in a Feb. 8 letter that many of them had received payments, but the agency was aware some were still waiting.
At a Feb. 17 meeting of a state committee that oversees major technology projects, the DCS staffer in charge of the Guardian project gave an upbeat assess
ment of the long-awaited project.
“Everything is working as expected and more importantly, no interruptions at all,” Linda Roberts told the state Information Technology Authorization Committee. Project engineers had moved more than 400 million records from the old system, called CHILDS, to Guardian.
“Congratulations to you and the team for a significant milestone accomplishment,” ITAC chairman J.R. Sloan said of Guardian’s launch.
Roberts acknowledged some problems with paying providers.
“Part of our portal for our foster community is still not accessible at this time,” she said, according to an audio recording of the session. A fix would be in place by the following day, she added, so foster parents could submit their invoices in order to get their payments.
Late last month, DCS said it shut down computer access to the foster and adoptive families to make sure that the system would handle contractors and staff first.
But one group home operator said he’s still waiting for payment that was due a month ago, despite assurances that his payment had been processed days earlier.
“The lack of detailed communication is adding to the anxieties in the environment and providing very little hope,” he wrote in a letter to DCS.
Jammed phone lines
Indeed, payments were arriving in the bank accounts of some caregivers, particularly those who had set up an account in the Guardian portal before DCS shut it down. But as February ended and the March payment cycle started, others were still looking for payments due in January.
Samantha Webb is still waiting for her February stipend to help support her two foster children, one of whom she has since adopted.
“I’ve called like six or seven times,” she said, only to run into jammed phone lines. “I’ve yet to be able to leave a message.”
She counts herself lucky that her husband still has a job, given the coronavirus pandemic. Finances are tight in their Golden Valley home, but so far, they’ve managed without the promised state support, Webb said.
“I don’t have any hope,” she said, referring to the payments that should arrive this month.
No access for review boards
At the technology committee hearing, David Byers of the state Supreme Court said the staff for foster care review boards, which is an arm of the Supreme Court, lost their connection to DCS’ system in the transfer to Guardian. That was intentional.
“There was not a role created for the foster care review board,” Roberts told Byers, who is a member of the technology committee. The project was built to be very strict about who could access the system, she said.
Byers said without the ability to see the case files electronically, DCS would have to start providing cumbersome paper files daily on children’s cases. The file reviews are central to the job that the boards are required to do by state law.
Roberts said she would talk to DCS Deputy Director Shalom Jacobs and work out a solution. As of March 4, there wasn’t one, but talks were underway, Byers’ office said.
In a statement Friday, DCS said its case managers send the files electronically to the review board staff and was not aware that the process worked the other way: that the court staff had, at least previously, access to the system.
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