at the Cuban capital’s port, forklifts carefully unload American eggs from a refrigerated container. The eggs are bound for an online private supermarket that, much like Amazon Fresh, provides home delivery.
These ventures are part of an explosion of thousands of private businesses that have opened in recent years across Cuba, a remarkable shift in a country where such enterprises have not been permitted and where Fidel Castro rose to power leading a communist revolution determined to eliminate capitalist notions such as private ownership.
But today, Cuba is confronting its worst financial crisis in decades, driven by government inefficiency and mismanagement and a decadeslong U.S. economic embargo that has led to a collapse in domestic production, rising inflation, constant power outages, and shortages of fuel, meat and other necessities.
So the island’s communist leaders are turning back the clock and embracing private entrepreneurs, a class of people they once vilified as “filthy” capitalists.
Taking advantage of loosened government restrictions granting Cubans the legal right to set up their own enterprises, roughly 10,200 new private businesses have opened since 2021, creating a dynamic, if fledgling, alternative economy alongside the country’s hobbled socialist model.
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