In a Shift, Cubans Savor Working for Themselves 

By Victoria Burnett
The New York Times 
February 3, 2011 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/world/americas/04cuba.html

BAUTA, Cuba - Marisela Alvarez spends much of the day
bent over a single electric burner in her small outdoor
kitchen. Her knees are killing her. Her red hair smells
of cooking oil.

She hasn't felt this fortunate in years.

"I feel useful; I'm independent," said Ms. Alvarez, 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."

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.

Hoping to resuscitate Cuba's crippled economy,
President Raúl Castro opened the door to a new, if
limited, generation of entrepreneurs last year, after
warning that the state's "inflated" payrolls could end
up "jeopardizing the very survival of the Revolution."

The Cuban labor federation said the government would
lay off half a million of about 4.3 million state
workers by March and issue hundreds of thousands of new
licenses to people wanting to join Cuba's tiny private
sector, in what could be the biggest remodeling of the
state-run economy since Fidel Castro nationalized all
enterprise in 1968.

By the end of 2010, the government had awarded 75,000
new licenses, according to Granma, the Communist
Party's official newspaper, swelling the official ranks
of the self-employed by 50 percent.

That is still a long way from the amount needed to
create alternatives for all the workers who will
eventually be laid off, and there is no guarantee that
the market will support hundreds of thousands of
freelancers. But licenses have been granted quickly,
and the government has been encouraging the bureaucracy
to keep them flowing.

Streets once devoid of commerce in towns like this and
in Havana are gradually coming to life as people hang
painted signs and bright awnings outside their houses
and mount roadside stalls. An electronics engineer, who
for years operated in the shadows, now publishes
leaflets that claim he can mend every appliance under
the sun. A practitioner of Santería sells beaded
necklaces, ground sardines and toasted corn used in
ceremonies at the tin-roofed shop in her yard.

Ms. Alvarez and her husband, Ivan Barroso, took out a
license for the cafe and another to sell meat and fish.
Now the couple does a brisk business serving soft white
rolls filled with garlicky pork and fresh tuna for 60
cents at a wooden counter in the gateway of their
house. Ms. Alvarez, a former school librarian who gave
up work several years ago, runs the cafe with her
stepson. Mr. Barroso goes fishing, culls pigs and
delivers produce to clients in Havana.

"If you have the ability, the dedication to achieve
something, you should enjoy it," said Mr. Barroso, who
until November sold fish and pork without a license to
a close circle of friends and clients.

About 85 percent of all Cubans with jobs are employed
by the state, earning about $20 per month in exchange
for free access to services like health and education,
and a ration of subsidized goods.

Fidel Castro grudgingly allowed the private sector to
take root in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the
Soviet Union brought the Cuban economy to its knees.
Over the years, however, the government stopped issuing
new licenses and suffocated many businesses with taxes
and prohibitions.

This time Raúl Castro, who took over from his brother
Fidel in 2006, says things have changed. In a speech to
the National Assembly in December, he urged members of
the government and the Communist Party to help the
private sector, not "demonize" it.

"It is essential that we change the negative feelings
that no small number of us harbor toward this kind of
private labor," Mr. Castro said.

Many remain skeptical. Juan Carlos Montes ran a private
restaurant on the patio of his Havana home for five
years but became worn down by nit-picking inspectors
and closed it in 2000. Now he is reluctant to try
again.

"When someone who has made the same argument for more
than 40 years suddenly changes their tune, you have to
have a lot of faith to believe them," he said.

His wife, Yodania Sánchez, has been trying to change
his mind. She has a license to rent two rooms in their
higgledy-piggledy house and pays about $243 in taxes
every month, whether the rooms are occupied or not.

"The changes are really positive; there are new
opportunities," she said on a recent morning as she
cleaned their tiny kitchen. "People want Cuba to become
Switzerland overnight, and that's not possible."

But Mr. Montes swears he will not open a new restaurant
until there is a wholesale market.

"People can't get what they need to run a business," he
said. "The carpenter has no wood. The electrician has
no cable. The plumber has no pipes. Right now, there is
no flour in the shops. So what are all the pizzerias
doing? They have to buy stuff that is stolen from
bakeries."

The government says it will set up a wholesale market -
though it might take years - and this year will import
$130 million worth of goods and equipment for the
private sector. It is also planning microloans and
business cooperatives and mulling allowing people to
buy and sell cars and houses, measures that some
analysts speculate might be announced ahead of the
Communist Party Congress in April.

For now, carpenters like Pedro José Chávez are allowed
only to do repairs, rather than make things, because
there is no legal market for wood. His workshop,
perched on a rooftop in the Vedado area of Havana, is
filled with crude machines made of salvaged parts
because proper tools are too expensive.

"It's absurd that they will give you a license to work
but they won't give you access to materials," Mr. Chá
vez said. "Cuba is falling apart," he added, gesturing
to the crumbling buildings nearby. "We could help
rebuild it."

For the private sector to thrive, the government should
vastly expand the list of occupations open to the self-
employed to include mainstream professions like
engineering or law, said Ted Henken, an expert on the
Cuban private sector at Baruch College.

The list of 178 jobs currently open to self-employed
Cubans - among them, fixing parasols and mending bed
frames - is highly specific and seems intended mainly
to legalize and tax people working on the black market.

"There is a lot more to be done for the state to get
out of the way and for people to produce and employ,"
Professor Henken said.

The government will also need to confront the question
of civil and political rights that will emerge with the
growth of a commercial class, including potentially
divisive issues like growing disparities in wealth.

"There's no end to the chaos and demands of a private
economy," Professor Henken said.

In the meantime, Ms. Alvarez and Mr. Barroso are
relishing life on the almost-free market. Mr. Barroso
pores daily over an exercise book where he calculates
profit margins. Total sales for the two businesses are
around $270 a week, he said. He and his wife each pay
about $37 a month in taxes, plus 10 percent on profits
at the end of the year.

Ms. Alvarez vies for customers with a couple of cafes
that have opened within two blocks of hers. On a recent
morning, all three had more clients than the bleak
state-run bar on the same street, whose offerings
included omelet sandwiches, hand-rolled cigars and
condoms.

"I think the government has realized that state
business doesn't function," Mr. Barroso said. "It's the
private sector that generates competition. We have a
habit of doing things poorly in Cuba, but competition
is going to put this straight."

___________________________________________

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