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 payments platform that moves money in and out of Cuba over crypto rails, sender-to-wallet, without ever touching a state bank.

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."

QvaPay is 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.