HAVANA — It's fair to say President Obama has learned at least one word of Cuban Spanish since normalizing relations with communist Cuba 15 months ago.
Cuentapropista.
These self-employed people work outside state-sponsored business, either as sole proprietors or employees of small businesses. Mostly in the service industries: cab drivers, restaurant owners, barbers, mechanics and even cigarette-lighter repairmen.
“Today about half a million Cubans, including some of you, are proud cuentapropistas, running your own restaurants, cafes, beauty salons, barber shops. Or working as artists, seamstresses and taxi drivers,” Obama said, noting that these businesses now employ about a third of the Cuban people.
“With help from services like Airbnb, more Americans are staying at your casas particulares and eating at your palandars, like my family did last night,” Obama said, struggling to pronounce the Spanish words for private bed and breakfasts and restaurants. “The food was really good, even if my Spanish is not that great.”
Obama spoke Monday at a meeting of Cuban entrepreneurs, where he become an evangelist for capitalism in a country dominated by a socialist regime for nearly six decades.
The United States, he said, was “built on entrepreneurship and market-based principles, and it's produced wealth that's unmatched in the history of the world.” And he argued that those same market principles could help empower the Cuban people by making them less reliant on government.
To help spread that message, Obama brought with him to Cuba an entourage of CEOs from 11 companies, including Airbnb and Paypal.
“What we represent is diplomacy on a person to person level,” said Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, which now has 4,000 bed-and-breakfast-style homes for rent in Cuba.
“One of our hosts told me, we had a lot of misconceptions about Americans. When you live with them for a year, you start to think very differently about Americans.”
Paypal CEO Dan Schulman said his company is making inroads on remittances, the money Cuban-Americans send to family in Cuba at lower rates than traditional financial services that take a cut of up to 25%. “That’s ridiculous with technology. Technology ought to be able to solve that,” he said.
Former secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, a Republican who served under President George W. Bush, said economic engagement doesn’t have to come at the expense of human rights.
“I see this mission, and this visit, this presidential visit as a great journey of human rights,” he said. “The right to make a living is one of the most precious of human rights.”
At a press conference with Cuban President Raul Castro, Obama argued that empowering the Cuban people economically will lead to more momentum to end the congressionally imposed embargo of the island nation.
“If we start seeing those kinds of commercial deals taking place and Cubans are benefiting from greater access to the Internet,” Obama said, “that builds a constituency for ending the embargo. If we build on the work we're doing in agriculture and you start seeing more U.S. farmers interacting with Cuban farmers and there's more exports and imports, that builds a constituency. The possibility of ending the embargo increases.”
