ABSTRACT
In his speech before the National Assembly on August 2, 2010, President Raúl Castro announced that the Council of Ministers had agreed to expand self-employment. To that end, they eliminated various prohibitions in the granting of licenses and on some types of goods and services and made more flexible the employment of workers in such enterprises. Two months later, the Council introduced a variety of liberalization measures meant to stimulate the small enterprise sector so that it could absorb large numbers of state sector workers who were considered redundant and were to be laid off. When the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party met in April 2011, it ratified that supportive approach to small enterprise, and in May, the Council initiated further liberalizing steps because the small enterprise sector had not expanded rapidly enough.
