Cuba’s entrepreneurs distraught over new U.S. policy
U.S. visitors, who now face restrictions, brought prosperity
When Julia de la Rosa heard President Trump’s speech on restricting Americans’ ability to visit Cuba, she immediately started calculating how many workers she’d have to fire.
De la Rosa, 49, spent the past 20 years renovating an abandoned family home into a private bed and breakfast in Havana. She and her husband used to rent out five rooms but expanded to 10 after President Obama re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba in December 2014, unleashing a flood of American travelers to the long-isolated, communist island.
De la Rosa said the expected drop in U.S. visitors, who account for two-thirds of her business, would force her to let go of some of the 20 maids, cooks, carpenters, gardeners and drivers she employs. “For the first time, we thought our future had no limits,” de la Rosa said of the period after Obama announced the opening with Cuba. “Now I feel like everything is crumbling around me.”
In Trump’s speech Friday in Miami, he said he would restrict American travel to Cuba because U.S. dollars were going straight into the hands of Cuban President Raúl Castro and his communist regime. Trump said too many Americans stayed in governmentrun hotels, ate at governmentrun restaurants and didn’t help Cuba’s growing class of private entrepreneurs.
Nearly 300,000 Americans flocked to Cuba in the first five months of 2017, almost the same number as all of last year, according to the Cuban government.
“They only enrich the Cuban regime,” Trump said.
Cuba’s growing class of private entrepreneurs, more than 530,000 people working independently outside the state-run economy, said the opposite is true. Nereyda Rodriguez sells paintings by local artists in Old Havana and said her business has boomed thanks to all the Yankees. “These last two years have been great,” she said. “We talk with the Americans; they learn about our lives, we learn about theirs.”
Trump’s restrictions are counterproductive because they will limit travelers who help Cuban entrepreneurs, said Augusto Maxwell, who chairs the Cuba practice at the Akerman law firm in Miami that represents airlines, Airbnb and other U.S. companies operating in Cuba.
He described American travelers as independent people who don’t want to stay in government hotels, so he doesn’t understand why Trump believes they help the regime. “Folks who tend to stay in private homes, who hire a private car for the day, who eat at private restaurants ... are now generally disallowed from traveling to Cuba,” he said.