U.S. President Joe Biden last May loosened restrictions on travel, remittances and migration, and promised the United States would do more to support the fledgling private sector in Cuba.

Change, however, has been too slow to come, said Paul Johnson, chair of the U.S. Agricultural Coalition for Cuba, a more-than-100-member organization that includes national and state farm organizations, corporations and producers.

“We’re losing, and we’re tired of losing,” Johnson told reporters on the sidelines of the gathering at a hotel in Havana.

The U.S. businesses are keen to both sell their own product to Cuba and to invest in private sector farms and cooperatives to help them develop.

Little has changed on the island since a similar group of would-be investors arrived last April. Many farms have been shuttered by lack of investment, equipment, fuel and supplies, leading to widespread shortages of food across Cuba.

“It’s frustrating to us in the United States, because we believe it’s something that we can fix. We need to go back to our government… and insist that the private sector is a path forward to development,” said Johnson.

Cuba, a long-time foe of the U.S., swapped capitalism for socialism shortly after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, preferring state over private enterprise.

But in August 2021, the communist-run government lifted a ban on private companies that had been in place since 1968. Upwards of 7,000 such businesses have opened since, according to an economy ministry list updated on March 23.

Canada, according to the federal Trade Commissioner Service, is Cuba’s second-largest source of direct investment, with “significant” stakes in mining, energy, agriculture and heavy equipment, as well as in tourism, with over one million Canadians visiting Cuba annually, pre-pandemic. Cuba is also Canada’s top market in the Caribbean/Central American sub-region.

Investors from countries including Mexico, Venezuela, Vietnam, China, Spain and Russia, among others, have also previously participated in state and private business in Cuba.

The United States remains an outlier. The U.S. Treasury Department last May authorized a company owned by entrepreneur John Kavulich to invest in a small private business in Cuba’s services sector, the first such approval in decades.

But many other similar requests remain unanswered, Johnson said.

“Obviously that’s just not good enough,” Johnson said. “We’re capitalists. We invest in private business all around the world. Why can’t we do it in Cuba?”

Despite the loosening of some restrictions, a Cold War-era U.S. embargo on Cuba remains in place, prohibiting some trade and financing between the two countries and complicating investment ties.

— Nelson Acosta is a Reuters correspondent in Havana. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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Colombia is one of the world’s biggest producers of cocaine, derived from the coca plant. Experts hope an end to hostilities can lead to a drop in production.

A joint statement said the United Nations-backed project would begin next month in the municipality of Briceno, Antioquia, where a joint effort to eliminate land mines began in 2015 as part of confidence building between the two sides.

Under the agreement, the government will provide security for FARC delegates to implement the agreement, as well as funding programmes to help farmers transition to alternative crops.

“This joint work on the ground with local leaders and their communities has opened up the possibility to incorporate alongside the humanitarian de-mining effort the voluntary substitution of illicit crops,” the statement said.

The agreement comes as the two sides are in the final stretch of peace negotiations begun in November 2012 in Havana, where all issues except for a final ceasefire, disarmament and the reincorporation of fighters into civil society have been settled.

“We made the decision to begin the transcendental and unique project before signing the final peace agreement in consultation with the farmers and with support of the United Nations,” FARC lead negotiator Ivan Marquez said in Havana.

The FARC agreed in 2014 to break ties with drug traffickers, help eradicate illegal crops like coca and help fight the production of narcotics.

But authorities have accused the rebels of instead stoking resistance to the eradication of illicit coca crops and keeping up their ties to drug trafficking.

The latest U.N. figures showed a 44 per cent increase in coca cultivations in 2014 to 69,000 hectares (170,503 acres) in the South American nation, a jump the U.N. linked to the peace talks, suspension of aerial spraying and rising market prices for coca.

Colombia’s war has dragged on for more than half a century, leaving 220,000 dead and millions displaced.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nelson Acosta in Havana. Additional reporting for Reuters by Helen Murphy.

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