After decades of being stripped of many of their rights for leaving the country, Cubans living in Miami and elsewhere will be able to invest and own private businesses on the island, the country’s deputy prime minister said Monday, confirming earlier reporting by the Miami Herald.

Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga told NBC News Monday morning that “Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies” and “also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.”

“This extends beyond the commercial sphere,” said Pérez-Oliva, who is a grandnephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro and is also Cuba’s minister of foreign trade and investment. “It also applies to investments — not only small investments, but also large investments, particularly in infrastructure.”

On Friday, the Miami Herald reported that Cuban authorities were expected to announce measures leading to an economic opening, including for Cuban nationals abroad to own business on the island.

The announcement comes after the island’s hand-picked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, admitted Friday that Cuba is indeed in talks with the Trump administration, weeks after the Miami Herald broke news that members of Secretary of State Marco Rubio had met Raúl Castro’s grandson in St. Kitts in February. The grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, was seated in the audience in a government meeting in which Díaz-Canel first disclosed the talks and later in a press conference on Friday, even though Rodriguez-Castro has no official title.

A source with knowledge of the conversations who asked not be identified to speak of the sensitive issue said Cuba’s move to allow Cuban Americans to own property and invest on the island — a major concession that Cuban leaders have been resisting for decades — is a direct response to the increasing pressure by the Trump administration to make reforms on the communist-run island.

“This is historical change,” said Hugo Cancio, a Miami businessman and owner of Katapulk, an online supermarket that delivers groceries on the island. Cancio has long advocated for the right of Cubans abroad to take part in the country’s economic life. “That’s been my focus for more than 20 years: explaining to the Cuban government that the diaspora is Cuba’s most important asset, not just because we have the know-how, the capital, but because we need to be part of the Cuban nation and we need to get back those rights we lost when we emigrated.”

A hostile relationship

Millions of Cubans have left the island since Fidel Castro took power in 1959, fleeing political repression and poverty. In the 1960s, many left Cuba fearing the firing squads, losing all of their properties as they departed. Others left Cuba as political refugees after serving years in prison. In 1980 more than 125,000 left through the port of Mariel. A decade later around 35,000 made it to the U.S. and the U.S. base in Guantánamo in handmade rafts, a practice that has never fully stopped. It is unknown how many died on the shark-infested waters of the Florida Straits.

And since 2021, about two million people have left Cuba, in what is believed to be the highest mass exodus in six decades.

During all the time, Cubans living abroad have not been allowed to invest on the emerging private sector or legally own their own businesses in the country. They also cannot vote.

The hostile relationship between the Cuban government and Cuban migrants is rooted in politics. Since the beginning of Fidel Castro’s revolution, Cubans had few avenues to oppose the government, and instead chose to vote with their feet and leave if they were able to do so.

Castro portrayed Cubans wanting to leave the country as counterrevolutionary and “worms” and prohibited citizens to travel abroad without government authorization. After his brother Raúl Castro took power and eased travel restrictions in 2013, that image faded somewhat, though Cuban leaders are still belligerent in particular about the Cuban-American community in South Floridas, which has through the years vocally opposed communism on the island.

The Trump effect

But President Donald Trump appears to have forced Cuban leaders’ hand to welcome back it own people.

Over the past few months, Trump put in place what amounts to an oil blockade, preventing oil from Venezuela, Mexico and other countries to reach the island, finally forcing Cuban leaders to negotiate. In recent days, he has urged Cuban authorities to reach a deal quickly.

“Cuba is a failed nation,” Trump told reporters on Sunday aboard Air Force One. “Cuba also wants to make a deal, and I think we will pretty soon either make a deal or do whatever we have to do.”

Cuban officials have said the island has received no oil shipments from three months. The lack of oil has exacerbated the existing problems with Cuba’s crumbling electrical grid and led to nearly constant blackouts all over the island.

According to the NBC report, the deputy prime minister suggested the reforms aim at reviving a range of sectors, from tourism and mining to modernizing the crumbling power grid. Pérez-Oliva is expected to provide more details later this week. Until now, the Cuban government has not allowed private businesses to invest in the country’s infrastructure.

Pérez-Oliva told NBC the U.S. embargo and other U.S. sanctions have made it difficult for the government to reform its economy. If Cubans in Miami – and U.S. companies in general – were to own businesses in Cuba, they would need authorization from the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments that oversee the enforcement of the U.S. sanctions, which means that, ultimately, it’s in Trump’s hands to decide on whether U.S. capital can flow to Cuba again.

A law Congress passed in 1996, known as Helms-Burton, precludes the president from fully lifting the embargo until a democratically elected government is in place on the island. But the Trump administration can change regulations to ease sanctions in response to economic reforms in Cuba.

Another obstacle for U.S. investments in Cuba: the thousands of property claims by American companies and Cuban Americans whose properties were confiscated by Castro early on without compensation, and that amount to more than $9 billion.

A major roadblock still lies ahead on the Cuban side: Cuba’s legal system and constitution provide little protection for investors and private property. Without such changes, the large Cuban-American fortunes and big American companies are unlikely to invest on the island, several experts and Cuban American businessmen have told the Herald.

Carlos Saladrigas, a Cuban American businessman from Miami and chairman of the Cuba Study Group, an influential organization that has supported Cuba’s emerging private sector, called the announcement Monday “a very important step,” but one that would have to go hand-in-hand with major changes both in Cuba and in the U.S. if the island is to attract significant capital.

On the U.S. side, that sort of economic activity, much of it currently prohibited by the embargo, would need to be authorized. The required banking and financial transactions on the U.S. side would need approval as well.

‘Political changes’

On Cuba’s side, the changes will need to be profound, Saladrigas said: “What is needed is the rule of law, sufficient guarantees for investors to prevent arbitrary confiscations, monetary stability, and macroeconomic changes that we are not seeing yet.”

Some of the needed changes are political in nature, he said. “For example, an independent judiciary is an essential change to give investors confidence in the country. That, to me, is a political change. There has to be national peace and harmony. That requires political changes.”

The banking system on the island, in particular, would require major transformations, Cancio said, including the ability for companies to operate in dollars and not in the devalued Cuban peso, and the right to take the profits out of the island.

It is unclear how far Cuban authorities would go in their efforts to reform the country’s economy, which stills follow a centrally planned socialist model that has proved ineffective and unable to sustain the population unless getting help from abroad. On Saturday, Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, a hard-liner, said talks with the United Stated do not “pertain to domestic affairs, constitutional frameworks, or the political, economic, and social models of the two countries.”

The publication on X, however, was only in Spanish, hinting it might be directed to domestic audiences.

Cancio urged Cuban leaders to change their mentality and realize that Cubans from Miami “are not just arriving with a check, but with our values, our principles, our convictions, our political philosophy.”

The Cuban government, he added, needs to “understand that we can have differences in that sense and we can disagree on political issues and respect each other’s criteria. It’s not that we are going to go with a check, and then we will be expected to get in line with their system, otherwise, the business is not approved.”

Cancio acknowledged much remains up in the air, there is suspicion on both sides and much work needs to be done to ensure that “we Cubans can return with all the necessary guarantees,” he said.

“But we have to start somewhere.”

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