Customers at a Juanky’s Pan fast-food restaurant in Havana.
Photographer: Natalia Favre/BloombergCommunist Cuba Is Leaning on Capitalists After Oil Runs Out
Private businesses that emerged on the island despite years of persecution will be key to whatever comes next as Trump pushes to end 67 years of one-party rule.
To Fidel Castro and Cuba’s communist elite, private businesses were totems of capitalist evil.
Now, with the country running out of food and fuel, the regime on the brink and anger spreading in the streets, it’s those private businesses — run by once-persecuted, small-scale capitalists — that hold the key to salvaging what’s left of Cuba’s economy.