HAVANA (AP) — Cuban entrepreneurs and artists are welcoming a series of government decisions to soften laws that they said would have sharply limited private enterprise and artistic expression.
The partial rollbacks may provide important clues to the governing style of President Miguel Diaz-Canel. He’s the first person from outside the Castro family to hold the country’s top position since its 1959 revolution.
The new laws were announced in July, three months after Diaz-Canel took office, and they generated bitter complaints from entrepreneurs and artists. They would have limited the number of business licenses per household and barred more than 50 seats at private restaurants. They also granted a corps of cultural “inspectors” the power to immediately close any art exhibition or performance.
The government last week eased some of those rules.
