My History as a Cuban Entrepreneur
HAVANA TIMES – Today, dedicating oneself to some private business activity is considered normal and even well-regarded, as is starting a business in general. However, those of us who are no longer so young recall a time when having a business in Cuba was equivalent to being a criminal. And, in fact, such businesspeople were literally criminals, because such practices were illegal, outside of the State.
I consider myself an entrepreneur by nature. I see business opportunities in everything, not in an unhealthy way, of course. I just have a skill for perceiving business opportunities, and often the people who know me consult with me and I give them ideas for starting a business, which almost always gives good results.
Personally, I dedicate my time to a business of my own, apart from journalism and some civic activity for a Better Cuba, and I’ve been successful. It’s working well for me. And I believe that reviewing my personal history is a way to approach this topic that’s so stigmatized amidst the political clashes taking place between Cubans.
Since the time I was little, in the 80s, I always found the criminal stigma attached to the clandestine businesses of that time to be shocking. My maternal family, descendants of Gallegos, were (and still are) all independent-minded and “businesspeople.” It’s rare to find someone [in this family] working “for the State.” That’s a common thing now, but it was quite unusual before the nineties. Very early, after I was about 15, I discovered that I had inherited from my mother the soul of an entrepreneur – although hers was still in the closet.
After the 90s, with the fall of the Berlin wall, many things changed. As salaries depreciated and scarcities mounted, my father’s machismo and dogmatic radicalism ceded in the face of concrete necessity, and my mother and I began to carry out “little deals” to alleviate our shortages. Naturally, since I was a good student, and there were still hopes that Cuba’s future belonged to the men and women of science [as opposed to recipients of family remittances], studying came first.
My mother was a housewife, and my father a clerk in a ration store with a salary of 148 pesos for a family of five, including his three children – my two sisters and me. We really lived very close to the edge of poverty. The goal was to study, graduate with a university diploma, and improve our lot, as tens of thousands had done in that way. We never imagined that they were the last; that never again would studying be the path to improve your life.
I did my pre-university studies [10 – 12th grades] at the Holguin Vocational School. My first business was investing the five-peso allowance my father gave me weekly in plastic flowers that were still sold in the shops of the provincial capital. My mother resold them in our town during the week. It was a success and worked well for some months, until there were no more flowers left to buy. The “Special Period” crisis was beginning, and everything was running out.
I then observed that many of my live-in dorm companions had begun smoking, and the student store didn’t sell cigarettes. So right away, I began to sell them, and in that way get enough money to get by there at school. Also, on the Saturdays when there were no home passes, I’d go to the Mayabe Valley, a recreation center back then, and buy little ricotta cheese snacks for 20 cents, then resell them for 40 cents, thus doubling my investment. Small things like that.
Once I reached the Universidad de Oriente, as a Biology major, my monthly stipend was 15 Cuban pesos a month. An individual pizza cost 20. My father was barely able to give me 20 additional pesos every two weeks. It was impossible to survive on that, so right away I discovered something I could do a little business with. I went home every weekend, and I made a contact in Holguin, 56 miles from my home in Mayari, who was making soap from coconut oil. My mother then sold these soaps during the week.
Further, I rented a bicycle and searched for ground sardines, a commodity that would later be used for pig feed, but at that time was a food in great demand by people, amid the scarcity. In that way, I went on surviving.
I occasionally obtained cigarettes and took them to the university to sell; and when I found some cases of Bariay Rum in Mayari, I’d take the bottles to Santiago and give them to one of my aunts who lived there, paying her a commission to sell them for me. That province had a temporary shortage of rum, because they were restoring the factories in order to enter the new hard currency market, so that was a passing opportunity.
When the dollar was decriminalized in 1993, they opened a small TRD [dollar] store in the Sueño suburb of Santiago – I remember it was called “Fantasy.” There, I found “the business” I would keep up until I finished my university studies in 1998; reselling in Mayari the items in high demand that were sold there in dollars. Studying took up half my time; looking for what to sell to be able to continue studying, the rest.
When I graduated, I was placed at a provincial research center investigating sugar cane. The work was very interesting, but I earned just 198 pesos a month. I was in a relationship where we were nearly married, and she was studying medicine. I felt I should help her, but the salary didn’t even stretch enough to cover me. So, I turned to raising pigs outside of my work time, and to reselling things. My mother’s help was no longer enough, and I established three other points of sale.
That’s how I made a living, but my formal job also involved responsibility and took up my time, so I was very limited in the growth of any business venture. Working for the State continued to be the “Legal route,” and more secure, although insufficient. Business ventures were tolerated up to a certain level, but they had no “legality.”
When Fidel decided to destroy half – and later more – of the sugar industry, that decision shocked me so much that I left the field of agricultural science associated with that crop. I went into Public Health and finished the medical genetics program, assigned to work and be responsible for the cytogenetic diagnostics in the eastern region of the province. I trained and worked in Holguin, waiting for equipment that never arrived after Fidel left his position.
During those two years in Holguin, I trained myself very well and was very respected among the professionals there. But I was earning 340 pesos, about 20% of what a person needed to sustain themselves. By that time, I was married to a teacher who earned around the same amount. During that period, my personal finances had a great windfall: I discovered that Holguin had developed a commercial structure that supplied merchandise to the businesspeople who sold in the informal market, almost all of them illegal at that time.
I managed to investigate and develop the needed contacts, and I created a network of people in Mayari who sold things from home. Hence, when I finished my day of doing chromosome studies, I’d go out and visit the informal businesses, and accumulate merchandise. On Friday afternoons, I’d take these items to Mayari and distribute them.
That’s how I began dealing in home appliances, essential for a minimal quality of life. I reinvested this money in a movie rental business, to have a more stable income. I was doing well, but by dedicating so much time first to studying then to working for the State, I couldn’t obtain the economic freedom I wanted, which was my objective.
To be continued.