The Biden administration, in a significant transfer to assist Cuba’s increasing personal sector, introduced on Tuesday new rules permitting Cuban entrepreneurs on the island to open financial institution accounts in the USA for the primary time and to make distant on-line transactions.
The loosening of banking guidelines may assist entrepreneurs to develop and encourage extra Cubans to start out small companies, Biden administration officers stated, and is supposed to assist assist Cubans dealing with hardship amid the nation’s financial disaster.
Till now, as a part of the strict financial embargo the USA has lengthy maintained towards Cuba, personal house owners couldn’t entry U.S. banks and have largely needed to depend on money remittances from family in the USA to finance their companies.
The U.S. Treasury Division stated the brand new guidelines utilized solely to “unbiased personal sector entrepreneurs” who had no connection to the Cuban Communist Get together, the navy, members of the Cuban Nationwide Meeting, or anybody on a listing of officers sanctioned by the USA.
The Cuban authorities didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In a significant reversal that got here many years after Cuba’s revolutionary leaders nationalized the economic system and outlawed personal firms within the Nineteen Sixties, the Cuban authorities in 2021 licensed the institution of small- and medium-size personal companies.
Since then, these enterprises have considerably grown, importing roughly the identical quantity of products final 12 months because the Cuban authorities, in line with Cuban officers.
Cuban economists estimate that the personal sector now accounts for practically a 3rd of all employment on the communist-run island, with greater than 11,000 licenses issued for personal firms. Every personal enterprise is allowed to rent a most of 100 staff.
