HAVANA: While on a trade trip in Cuba, representatives of the United States agro-businesses on Tuesday urged the Biden administration to ease limits and allow them to make more investments in the island’s private agriculture sector. They opined that they were “losing” in their initiative to increase commerce with Cuba’s farmers.
US President Joe Biden, in May 2022, eased limits on remittances, travel, and migration and vowed that the US would increase support to Cuba’s struggling private sector.
Paul Johnson, the US Agricultural Coalition for Cuba’s head, said any change has been slow to come. The coalition is an organization with more than 100 members, which comprises corporations, state, and national farm organizations, along with producers.
Johnson, speaking to reporters at a gathering in Havana, said “We’re losing, and we’re tired of losing.”
American businesses are eager to both export their own products to Cuba and to invest in private sector cooperatives and farms and cooperatives in order to aid their development.
Cuba ditched capitalism and adopted socialism shortly after Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, thus favoring state as opposed to private businesses.
US farmers seek to make investments in Cuba’s private sector
However, in August 2021, the communist-run Cuban government lifted a ban on private enterprises that had been enforced in 1968. More than 7,000 such outfits have opened since, as per an Economy Ministry list that was updated on 23 March.
Investors from countries including Russia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Mexico, China, and Spain, along with others, have in the past participated in the island’s private and state business.
The United States remains an exception. America’s Treasury Department in May 2022 gave approval to a company owned by tycoon John Kavulich to invest in a small private enterprise in the services sector, which had been the first approval, of this kind, in decades.
Johnson maintained that numerous other such requests were still unanswered.
