Helping to Harvest the Fruits of Freedom in Cuba
By: Manny Hidalgo, LEDC Executive Director
January 17, 2011
My Regional Micro-Lending Director, Cesar Lopez and I made a remarkable journey to Cuba last week that I’d like to share with all of LEDC’s stakeholders. What was largely different about this trip from many other trips I've made to Cuba since 1994 was the sense of cautious optimism in the air and the acceptance on the part of both the people and elites in the regime of capitalism as a way out of their current mess. Since Raul Castro's speech in April of 2010 when he announced that up to 1 million Cubans would be laid off from the public sector and are expected to find jobs in the private sector already 75,000 newly licensed micro enterprises have emerged.
Since most things in Cuba happen under the table you have to assume that tens of thousands more are operating without a license. This is both a blessing and a curse for the nation since for the first time in 53 years it seems like the regime really does believe that the socialist model doesn't work in Cuba and is willing to do something serious about it. Raul Castro has been emphatic that there's no turning back this time which is unfortunately what his brother has always done when he felt that capitalism was weakening his power.
For the first time in my five plus years at LEDC I truly understand the immense power of our work and the capacity that economic development has to change people's lives. I marveled at how eyes popped open when people learned from us about our programs and saw examples of cash flow projections and credit analysis. I took pleasure in the expressions on the enlightened faces of people from the Cuban Catholic Church we visited when we explained the differences in micro-lending between “la voluntad de pago” - the desire to repay and “la capacidad de pago” – the capacity to repay.
In general I was very surprised about how little Cubans know about formal financial institutions and capitalism in general. I always assumed that the regime taught them at least about everything that's wrong with capitalism but I didn't think that they just left it out of the curriculum altogether. The capacity to teach basic financial capability in Cuba is immense. What I hope we're able to do in Cuba is educate them about sustainable, community-based capitalism that has a triple bottom line – basically to reach the same outcomes we strive for in the Washington Metropolitan Area. As a nation Cuba has a new choice to make about their economic future. I hope they continue to choose the path less traveled and re-build themselves as democratic socialists who leverage capitalism for the greater good of the people and not just become another corrupt, elitist Latin American nation.
In the coming months we will be helping leaders in the Cuban Catholic Church institute what we believe will be an excellent microenterprise development pilot project that includes a heavy emphasis on training and technical assistance. The micro-loans will only be offered to those with a clear desire and capacity to repay them given the extreme risk factors in the Cuban economy and the overall absence of many core values we all take for granted in the US. Our goal is to train a Cuban project director on the island who will work directly for the Bishop of Santa Clara and have that person lead the charge in implementing the pilot project.
Our on-going role will be to check-in and advise him/her as necessary and help analyze outcomes and make decisions about expanding the project. We have chosen to organize our efforts through the Catholic Church because they are without a doubt the single, largest independent voice on the island. They also have the international backing of one the world’s largest and most organized institutions – the Roman Catholic Church.
In regards to how the Cuban authorities reacted to our journey it seems as though they found our work intriguing more than threatening since they did in fact open our entire luggage on the way in and review all of our personal materials. They jotted down notes on all my Cuban contacts, read over the briefing paper Cesar developed for our trip, and copied down our US Treasury license information. They had full knowledge of what we were going to be doing on our journey and on the way out of the country they did not question us whatsoever.
We'll see how their tolerance level for this micro-enterprise development project waxes and wanes in the months to come but I'm confident that we’re not in violation of any of the regime's laws. In fact the regime itself is exploring its own micro-lending model that they expect to roll out soon with help from the Spanish government.
I want to thank all of you who prayed for Cesar and me to have a safe and successful journey to Cuba. I also want to thank the Center for Nonprofit Advancement which covered the costs of this journey through the Gelman, Rosenberg, and Freedman EXCEL Leadership Award which I won in 2009. My goal for this journey was for it to provide Cesar and me with the kind of intensive, professional development that we needed to improve our micro-enterprise development efforts here in the Washington Metropolitan Area.
When you institute a project in an environment with every conceivable obstacle to successful implementation you learn to be more innovative than ever before. You also become more passionate about the role of your work to help harvest the fruits of freedom throughout the world.
At the end of the day the people of Cuba simply want to be closer to free. They fought a valiant war of independence from Spain in 1898 that resulted in the formation of a client state of the United States until 1959 when the Cuban Revolution overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Since the triumph of the Revolution they became a client state of the Soviet Union and since its collapse a victim of a Quixotic leader unwilling to face the facts that international communism has failed. As that leader ages and the “geritocracy” he’s created ages with him it has become clear that Cuba is transitioning to a market economy and hopefully a democratic political system that respects the rule of law, the protection of individual rights, and the promotion of individual responsibilities.
It is my dream, on this day that we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, that I will be able to leverage my experience as Executive Director of LEDC to play a small but determined role to help the Cuban people taste the sweet nectar of freedom. Such freedom will only emerge from a harvest of fruit born of the hard labor of the Cuban people working hand in hand with their allies from throughout the world. It is an honor for me in particular to be an ally in their heroic pursuit of freedom.
Manny Hidalgo
Executive Director
Latino Economic Development Corporation
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