The administration of Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel has given the ‘green light’ to Cubans owning their own businesses, a move observers say could be the first step in the direction of ushering in economic reforms designed to help respond to the unrelenting pressures which the administration faces at the hands of Washington and in more recent times, the further debilitating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Cuban economy.
The move by the Diaz-Canel administration to relax a 50-odd-year-old centralized Cuban economy will be seen outside Cuba as a possible step towards an eventually far more liberalised economic system though the announcement which comes in the wake of persistent reports of shortages attended by specific strictures seemingly designed to still try to hold the country’s centralized economy together.
