Cuba opens up its economy to private businesses
Cuba has announced it will allow individual businesses to operate generally in most industries, found in what is a main reform to its state-controlled economy.
Labor Minister Marta Elena Feito said the list of authorized sectors had expanded from 127 to a lot more than 2,000.
Simply a minority of industries would be reserved for the state, she said.
The communist country's economy has been hit hard by the pandemic and US sanctions introduced by the Trump administration.
Last year its economy shrank by 11% - its worst decline in almost 3 decades - and Cubans have already been facing shortages of standard goods.
Ms Feito said just 124 industries will be exempt from individual involvement. She didn't mention which ones, however the AFP suggest it could be related to sectors thought to be strategic to the talk about such as media, health insurance and defense.
"That private function continues to build up, is the objective of the reform," Ms Feito said, stressing that "will help no cost the productive forces" of the individual sector.
Apart from thousands of compact farms, Cuba's non-state sector is made up mainly of small individual businesses go by artisans, taxi drivers and tradesmen.
Almost 40% of private businesses operate in the island's tourist industry, which includes been hard hit simply by the pandemic and sanctions.
Some 60 years of hostility between your US and Cuba were eased in 2015 when then US President Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro decided to normalize relations, allowing US citizens to visit the island and empowering native businesses.
But Obama's efforts were rolled again by his successor, President Donald Trump, with the support of hawkish Cuban-Americans who found Mr Obama's historic starting as an appeasement of Castro's communist regime.
New US President Joe Biden - who was simply Barack Obama's vice-president - has previously signaled that he wants to improve US-Cuban relations but observers say it isn't clear how huge it might be over his priority list.
