The Cubans Rebuilding the Economy — Now

Locked out of every mainstream fintech because he was a Cuban living under the embargo, Erich García Cruz did the only thing left: he built his own. In 2019 he founded QvaPay — a sanctions-aware payments platform for Cuba's independent private sector, screening senders, recipients and wallet addresses against OFAC's SDN and Cuba Restricted lists, and designed to avoid state banks.

Dubbed "Cuba's crypto ambassador," he runs an 87,000-subscriber tech YouTube channel and launched BitRemesas so Cubans can receive dollar remittances in bitcoin. His conviction is blunt: "To use crypto, nobody has to authorize me."

Today QvaPay is a U.S. company — a Delaware C-corp — and the fintech that powers this Atlas: the rail that lets the diaspora support Cuban entrepreneurs directly.

Camilo Noa built XFX to do something bigger than move money: turn anyone into an independent remittance founder. It's a coin-powered community — you join, earn the community coin ($XFX), and redeem it to launch your own remittance business or coin-powered community.

The on-ramp is a free, no-middleman P2P market: post a buy/sell offer, connect directly with a peer, and settle at XFX-powered rates — no fees, no custodian, bilingual EN/ES. Businesses already built on it include CambioCUB, QvaStore, and SendSay.

Oniel Díaz left Cuba's state biotech sector to bet on something that barely existed: a private-sector consulting firm. In 2014 he co-founded AUGE in Havana, and it has since advised more than 300 Cuban private enterprises on strategy, foreign trade, and how to survive a shifting legal landscape.

He has become one of the most-quoted public voices for Cuba's MIPYMEs — pressing the state to move further and faster, and sounding the alarm when reforms threaten the small businesses he serves.

In 2016, Adriana Heredia co-founded Beyond Roots — a venture built entirely around Afro-Cuban culture. It runs immersive experiences that teach visitors the island's African legacy, and opened the first Afro aesthetic store in Cuba: a space for natural hair, identity, and connection to roots.

She also helps coordinate InCuba, the University of Havana's first innovation incubator — mentoring the next wave of campus founders while running her own company.

Cuba produces world-class engineers and almost no way for the world to find them. CuCoders is the fix: an open-source platform that indexes Cuban programmers, runs a jobs board, and knits the island's scattered developer talent into a single directory the global market can actually reach.

It's infrastructure for the most exportable thing Cuba makes — code — and a bridge over the embargo's biggest barrier for tech workers: visibility and payment.

When global delivery apps ignored Cuba, Cubans built their own. Mandao is a homegrown delivery platform linking restaurants, markets, and couriers across multiple cities — order, pay, and get it delivered, all on rails designed for Cuban reality.

It's the kind of everyday infrastructure that makes a private economy livable: a paladar reaching customers it couldn't before, a courier earning on a flexible shift, a household getting groceries without a two-hour line.

Long before Cuba had a startup "scene," Merchise Startup Circle was building one — a veteran community of developers and founders running meetups from Santa Clara to Havana, teaching, connecting, and mentoring across the island's tech underground.

It's the connective tissue: the place where a self-taught coder meets a would-be co-founder, where knowledge spreads that no Cuban university teaches.

Run by the Archdiocese of Havana, Proyecto CubaEmprende has trained thousands of Cubans to start and run their own businesses — a hands-on program (built on the ProEmpleo model) that hands ordinary people the tools to open a paladar, a workshop, a farm.

It's where the Church's social mission meets the private economy: entrepreneurship as dignity, taught for free, one cohort at a time — with a chapter now extended to Camagüey in central Cuba.