Ecosystem

Launched May 2012 at Centro Cultural Padre Félix Varela in Havana, a Catholic Church (Archdiocese of Havana) business-training program for private entrepreneurs. Started after Cuba Study Group members approached Cardinal Ortega and Mexico's Fundación ProEmpleo. Offers business training, business-plan help, and specialized advice. Part of a network that has trained 13,000+ entrepreneurs across Cuba.

Regional chapter extending the CubaEmprende training model to central Cuba.

Private consulting and corporate-services firm advising 300+ Cuban private enterprises (founded 2014).

Cuba's veteran developer and startup community, running meetups from Santa Clara to Havana.

Open-source platform for Cuban programmers — a developer directory, jobs board, apps and events, community-maintained on GitHub.

Homegrown Cuban delivery app linking restaurants, markets and couriers across most provincial capitals — a flagship private-sector tech success.

University of Havana innovation incubator (coordinated by Adriana Heredia).

Miami nonprofit connecting young professionals to support Cuban peers; parent of StartUp Cuba.

Media platform plus fellowships and workshops on Cuban entrepreneurship (launched 2014).

Nonpartisan nonprofit advocating for Cuba policy reform to support the Cuban people and diaspora engagement. CSG members helped launch Proyecto Cuba Emprende in 2012, a Catholic Church business-training program that has trained 13,000+ Cuban entrepreneurs. CSG also supports 10x10KCuba (launched 2016), a competition for Cuban programmers and startups with 500 Startups, Techstars and Stanford's School of Engineering, produced by MANO Americas. CSG advocates for financial access (microfinance, trade and payments) for Cuba's MIPYME sector and supports the 2026 Cuba Transformación roadmap. Executive Director: Ric Herrero, who is also an advisor to Proyecto Cuba Emprende and co-founder of MANO Americas. Herrero recently appeared on The World (PRX, Sep 30, 2026) discussing Cuba's reforms and U.S. investors positioning for an opening.

U.S. 501(c)(3) founded in 2012 that raises private funds for Proyecto Cuba Emprende, the on-island Catholic Church training program launched the same year at Centro Cultural Padre Félix Varela in Havana. The Foundation is OFAC-licensed, takes no government money and gives no funding to students. Its 80-hour curriculum covers marketing, finance and sales, followed by incubator or business-development support. As of 2020: 5,799 graduates and 4,069 businesses supported in Havana, Camagüey and Cienfuegos. The broader Cuba Emprende network reports 13,000+ entrepreneurs trained. Executive Director: Rosamaria Caballero (since 2022), active with Cuba's entrepreneurial community since 2016 and an advisor to the Cuban delivery platform Mandao. Chairman and co-founder: John McIntire; vice chair: Carlos Saladrigas, chairman of the Cuba Study Group. Directors include Consuelo Aróstegui Isaacson, president of Friends of Caritas Cubana.

How-to platform for starting and investing in Cuba (Yanoidis Mejias Mendoza).

Miami-based AI coaching and team-collaboration platform (Ask Aura) built on more than a decade of behavioral science. CEO Juan Luis (John) Betancourt, a member of the FIU Institute for Cuban Studies Community Advisory Board, founded Gonza, a private-equity-focused executive search firm, after partnerships at Korn/Ferry and Heidrick & Struggles; as Puma's chief marketing and strategy officer he relaunched the brand globally. He writes on leadership and AI coaching — e.g. “The Economics of AI Coaching” (Oct 2025) and “4 Strategies to Help Your Middle Managers Lead with Confidence” (Dec 2025), both for Employment Enterprises.

Miami digital alternative-investments platform for multi-jurisdictional investors and their advisors, now building governed AI agents for fund operations and investor workflows. Co-founded in 2024 by CEO Isidro Fernández — raised by Cuban immigrants in Union City, New Jersey, and a member of the FIU Institute for Cuban Studies Community Advisory Board — who was director of alternative investments at Santander Private Banking International and earlier worked at Hayfin Capital Management, Halcyon and Caja Madrid. Profiled by Funds Society (March 2025) on bringing private markets to wealth managers, with Latin America a priority.

Five Cuban-inspired, Art Deco modern short-term rental townhomes in Coconut Grove on Miami's Underline (opening 2026), a self-funded project of Cuban-heritage husband-and-wife team Laura Antuña Capestany and Jimmy Capestany that honors her family's Cuban legacy through architecture and storytelling. Laura, a Cuban-Peruvian American developer and writer on the FIU Institute for Cuban Studies Community Advisory Board, is the author of the debut historical novel The Last Prince of Cuba: A Daughter's Journey (announced for spring 2026), based on her family's untold history.

Cubanisms: A Look at Cuba through Art and Words (Mango Media, September 2016), by Miami lawyer and writer Pedro García-Menocal with illustrations by Cuban artist Gustavo “Garrincha” Rodríguez — a humorous guide to Cuban slang and Spanglish that traces many cubanismos to African and Taíno and Siboney roots as well as Spain. The author, great-grandson of Cuban president Mario García Menocal, is a venture and M&A partner at PAG Law (listed under OFAC counsel on Featured) and a member of the FIU Institute for Cuban Studies Community Advisory Board.

Seagull One: The Amazing True Story of Brothers to the Rescue (University Press of Florida, 2010; paperback 2025), by Havana-born author and editor Lily Prellezo, written in collaboration with founder José Basulto. Drawing on interviews with more than 100 people, it tells how the group's volunteer pilots flew the Florida Straits searching for balseros — saving over 4,200 — and recounts the February 24, 1996 shoot-down of two unarmed Cessnas, which led to significant changes in U.S.–Cuba relations. Prellezo, exiled to Miami in 1960 and an FIU English graduate, sits on the FIU Institute for Cuban Studies Community Advisory Board.

Physician-turned-writer and founder-editor of Cuba Cosmopolita, a media platform presenting Cuban culture and lifestyle content. Trained at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, with an M.D. from the University of South Florida and a Harvard B.A. in cell and molecular biology, she received an Ensemble Studio Theatre / Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commission for a full-length play on the interchange between science and society. Member of the FIU Institute for Cuban Studies Community Advisory Board.

Independent Cuban newsroom whose widely-cited informal exchange-rate tracker (tasa de cambio) has become a key economic indicator for the island.

Independent Cuban newsroom focused on the environment, disaster and community — award-winning investigative reporting.

Cuban data-journalism collective visualizing the numbers behind daily life on the island.

Long-running independent site of political and economic analysis of Cuba from a critical-left perspective (founded 2010).

English-language independent coverage of Cuban daily life, economy and civil society.

Havana/Miami outlet covering the Cuban economy, culture and U.S.–Cuba relations.

Award-winning Cuban narrative-journalism magazine (Gabo 2018) — long-form stories of the island and its diaspora.

Independent magazine on Cuban art, film, culture and critical thought.

Independent Cuban-economy research group; co-sponsor of the Cuba Transformación series.

Columbia Law School program on Cuban legal and economic reform.

Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies — MSME/MIPYME research on Cuba.

Florida International University institute (formerly the Cuban Research Institute) studying Cuban and Cuban-American organizations. Publishes the FIU Cuba Poll — the longest-running survey of Cuban American opinion, since 1991 — and the Briefings on Cuba policy series; eight of its reports are digested on Reform Watch.

University of Miami's Cuban Studies program and Cuban Heritage Collection — the largest archival repository of Cuban materials outside the island. Directed academically by historian Michael J. Bustamante (Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies; Director of Academic Programs, CHC), author of Cuban Memory Wars (2021).

Senior research fellow Erich de la Fuente, Ph.D., is lead author of the center's Latin America Country Risk Index and Analysis of political, economic, social and international risk, an adjunct professor of politics and international relations at FIU, and a member of the FIU Institute for Cuban Studies Community Advisory Board. He founded EDF Communications (acquired by Llorente & Cuenca in 2015) and has done field research in Cuba. His work includes the paper Cuba's Role in Venezuela's Control of the Internet and Online Social Networks (FIU, 2010) and the book Limiting Media Freedom in Democratic States (2022).

New York nonprofit that runs the Oslo Freedom Forum. Its Cuba work: a 50-million-satoshi Bitcoin Development Fund grant to elTOQUE (April 2022) to cover crypto adoption on the island; Rosa María Payá's "Let Cuba Decide" talk at the 2016 Oslo Freedom Forum; San Isidro Movement founder Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara in its inaugural Art in Protest Residency (2021) and among its 2025 Havel Prize for Creative Dissent laureates; and the HRF petition that led the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to declare his imprisonment arbitrary (2022). HRF condemned his forced exile to the U.S. on July 18, 2026.

Miami-based 501(c)(3) established in 1992 to promote a nonviolent transition to a democratic Cuba by empowering human-rights defenders, independent journalists and prisoners of conscience. Runs the public Represores database of documented regime repressors (since 2018) and backs the Observatorio Cubano de Conflictos, the monthly protest tracker cited on Reform Watch.

Founded in a Havana home on December 10, 2010 (Human Rights Day), Cubalex gives free, confidential legal aid to victims of state abuse, documents rights violations and takes them to national and international bodies. Forced into exile in 2017 after a 2016 state raid, it now works from the U.S. under executive director Laritza Diversent.

Spain-registered, nonpartisan legal NGO that keeps a monthly registry of Cuba's political prisoners (a record 1,339 at the end of August 2026), represents victims before courts and international bodies, and documents forced labor in Cuba's overseas medical missions.

Madrid nonprofit founded in 2009 that publishes monthly counts of repressive actions in Cuba (at least 10 every 24 hours in August 2026) and a Social Rights in Cuba survey whose ninth edition (2026) found 94% of Cubans living in extreme poverty.

Formed during the July 11, 2021 protests to track detentions and forced disappearances; now a program of Mexico-based Iniciativa para la Investigación y la Incidencia that maintains databases of people imprisoned for political reasons and of ~900 protests documented since January 2022, and reports to UN bodies and the IACHR.

Nonpartisan citizen initiative co-founded by Rosa María Payá, daughter of the late dissident Oswaldo Payá, campaigning for a binding plebiscite on free, fair, multiparty elections. In 2025 OAS member states elected Payá to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for 2026–2029.

Global press-freedom group whose Cuba page tracks arrests, prosecutions and forced exile of independent journalists — e.g., the six-year sentence handed to José Gabriel Barrenechea (January 2026) and the forced exile of Austin Llerandi (October 2026).

Its 2025/26 annual report finds systematic repression of dissent, persistent arbitrary detention, and torture and ill-treatment commonplace in Cuban prisons; more than 27,000 Amnesty solidarity letters have reached imprisoned artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.

Publishes a yearly World Report chapter on Cuba (latest: 2026) documenting the government's use of arbitrary detention against critics, artists and protesters; reports that hundreds of critics remain jailed, many of them July 2021 protesters.

Its Freedom in the World 2026 report rates Cuba "Not Free" at 9/100 — 0 of 40 on political rights and 9 of 60 on civil liberties, down from 10 the year before.

Ranks Cuba 160th of 180 in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index (up from 165th in 2025) and notes that the 2022 penal code's vague offenses, such as "contempt" and "public disturbances," can be used to prosecute journalists.