By Patrick Oppmann
Havana, Cuba (CNN) — As President Donald Trump rachets up the pressure on Cuba’s communist-run government and threatens a US “takeover” of the island, he frequently repeats a central promise: that decades after they left, Cuban exiles will soon be able to return to their homeland.
“A lot of unbelievable people are going to be going back to Cuba, hopefully not to stay,” Trump said at a recent White House event with prominent members of the Cuban American community in attendance. “We don’t want to make it so nice that they stay. But some people probably do want to stay.
They love Cuba so much,” he said.
Trump’s claim has struck a chord with many in the Cuban exile community who vowed never to return to the island while the Castros remained in power. But it also flies in the face of the reality that in recent years, an increasing number of Cubans who left are returning to see family, vacation and even quietly set up small businesses fronted by local partners.
The invitation to Cuban exiles to do business in their homeland has been made repeatedly by the government over the years but so far has produced few tangible results.
On Monday night, Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, Cuba’s deputy prime minister and minister for foreign trade and investment who is also a great-nephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro, said in a televised appearance that Cuban exiles are welcome to invest in the island.
Cuban exiles, Oliva Fraga said, would for the first time be able to openly own businesses on the island, invest in large-scale infrastructure projects, and hold bank accounts with state-run banks.
The offer will likely to do little to placate those in the Cuban American community advocating for greater political freedoms, a full economic opening and the return of property seized from exiles.
Exiles seek major overhaul
US economic sanctions block most commercial activity with the island. Many Cuban exiles say that Havana’s own tight restrictions on foreign investment severely limit business opportunities and that routine transactions take years under Cuba’s communist bureaucracy.
A wide-ranging overhaul of the island’s economic and legal system needs to happen before many exiles will consider returning to rebuild their country, said Pedro Freyre, a Cuban American who chairs the Akerman law firm’s international practice and has advised US companies on doing business in Cuba.
The island has reached “that moment when the emperor has no clothes,” Freyre told CNN. “We’re done here. You know, this thing collapsed, it failed, but we have a great opportunity to redo it, and we can do it.”
“If there’s a couple of things that we know how to do as Cuban Americans, it’s number one, build cities,” he added.
“I’ve dealt with the Cuban government before. There are smart people, people who are well-trained, well-educated, who understand what’s going on, and who have a built-in incentive,” Freyre said. “They’ve seen the destruction and the collapse of the country over the 60 years, and now the door is open.”
The Cuban government is under more pressure to reform its flatlining economy than at any point since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following the US attack on Venezuela in January and the Trump administration’s threats of tariffs on Mexico, access to fuel from abroad has been cut off.
Blackouts spur protests
Blackouts now last most of the day in many Cuban cities, tourism is dwindling, and some foreign companies have begun to pull their personnel from the island amid deteriorating conditions.
Weary of the constant blackouts, Cubans are increasingly taking to the streets to bang pots and pans and demand that the government keep the power on.
On Monday, Cuba’s energy grid collapsed, plunging ten million people into the dark. Officials said t