Odds and ends

• The Cuba Study Group’s idea to aid in the provision of micro-loans to Cuban entrepreneurs is a good one. But its Mexican partner is not so good, as Babalu points out here, citing a Business Week piece on the partner’s abusive practices toward poor and inexperienced Mexican borrowers.

• Will El Duque and his brother Livan Hernandez both pitch for the Mets this year? Estancia Cubana speculates here.

• Cuban television personality Carlos Otero explains his decision to leave Cuba, how he managed to leave with his family, and his plans for the future in an interview at Encuentro. If the link doesn't work, find it on the front page here.
  

Loans for small business

Here’s a positive initiative directed toward Cuba, albeit in a future when policies on both sides of the Straits have changed: the Cuba Study Group’s plan to provide credits and business education for Cuban micro-enterprises. It has nothing to do with sanctions, it is not conditioned on change in Cuba’s political leadership, and it is based on the assumption that Cuba has, as the group’s leader Carlos Saladrigas explains in this interview, a fine educational system and a workforce prepared for entrepreneurship. This would be a larger, formal means of carrying out what many Cuban Americans and others outside Cuba have already done to help Cuban entrepreneurs – a flow of direct assistance that would surely be greater if the Administration were not focused on limiting and controlling contact with the island.

A combination of private and public contributions are contemplated to build the fund for micro-loans, but the main connection to the U.S. government seems to be that Washington would have to get out of the way to let it proceed.

Saladrigas is in Europe drumming up interest in the initiative. I’m sure it’s not his intention, but his initiative provides quite a contrast to the widespread efforts emanating from Washington and Miami to pressure Spain and the rest of the EU on their policy toward Cuba.

Hope it prospers someday.