Cuba's struggling entrepreneurs look to Biden with hope

HAVANA (AP) — Business was booming for a trendy little clothing shop called Clandestina in the heart of Old Havana, one of thousands of new private businesses that had arisen in what was once a near-wholly state-run socialist economy.

A torrent of tourists poured through the doors to pick through bags, sweatshirts, camisoles and caps — at least until the Trump administration turned off the taps that had been opened just a few years before by then-President Barack Obama.

Today, those glass-and-wood doors swing open less often, with tourism choked both by U.S. sanctions meant to punish Cuba's government and a pandemic that has squashed tourism almost everywhere.

With their business tottering, Clandestina's owners — Idania Del Río and Leire Fernández — subsist on hope that new U.S. President Joe Biden will reverse at least some of the restrictions implemented by his predecessor.

“If Biden allows travel to Cuba, gives an image of Cuba as a friendly country ... that in itself is a radical change for the cash registers of entrepreneurs,” Fernández, 44, told The Associated Press.

In 2010, in an attempt to energize the island's sluggish, top-down economy, then-President Raúl Castro promoted an unprecedentedly broad opening to the private sector, allowing hundreds of sorts of small businesses — restaurants, shoe repairers, small clothing workshops and more — that have grown to employ some 600,000 people.

Some of the most successful targeted a surging number of tourists — part of another government opening meant to save the economy.

Tourism got a huge boost at the end of 2014 when Obama announced a historic thaw of relations with Cuba, arguing that five decades of U.S. sanctions against communist governments had failed and that more vibrant ties would do...