Global ICT Firms Urge Obama to Remove the Cuba Embargo
August 31st, 2010Nokia Oyj, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are urging the U.S. government to ease rules that keep them from operating in Cuba even after President Barack Obama loosened telecommunications regulations last year to promote democracy on the communist island.
Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile-phone maker, is urging the U.S. to ease its 47-year-old trade embargo so it can sell handsets to Cuba. AT&T and Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless providers, urged regulators to make it easier for U.S. companies to directly connect calls to and from Cuba.
The companies’ pleas come after Obama said in April 2009 that greater contact with the outside world would reduce Cubans’ dependency on President Raul Castro’s regime. Still, other regulations prevent companies with U.S. operations from entering the market, according to a July report by the Washington-based Cuba Study Group, which advocates for an open economy.
“We don’t understand why the regulations stopped where they did,” …
Cuba Embargo Means Nothing to Brits and Canadiens
May 25th, 2010Despite an economic embargo against Cuba that has existed for a half century, Americans and citizens of US allies routinely conduct business with the country, including trade and tourism.
In 1960, the Castro regime seized all American property and industry in Cuba. In response, the United States imposed an embargo against the nation. No American citizens could travel there and no American companies could do business there.
Known to Cubans as “el bloqueo” (“the blockade”), these restrictions were written into US law decades later, as the Cuban Democracy Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 1992. The goal of the law was to promote “a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba through the application of sanctions.”
At the time, normalized trade with the US might have been a valuable incentive for compliance with the 1992 law. The Soviet Union, Cuba’s primary backer, had collapsed one year earlier, devastating …
One Small Step: Cuba Liberalizes Barber Shops – See the Video
April 14th, 2010VIDEO: The Cuba government is allowing Cuban citizens to directly own and operate barber shops. Is this the beginning of something big? Click here for video
Is Cuba Poised to Become a Call Center Hub?
November 6th, 2009NSAM EXCLUSIVE GUEST POST
By Peter Ryan, Lead Analyst – BPO and Contact Center Outsourcing & Services, OVUM
Since Fidel Castro’s relinquishment of power to his brother, Raul, many Nearshore outsourcing speculators have been wondering aloud whether Cuba could be the next big thing for contact center services into North America.
Is Cuba Ready for a BPO Revolution? We Have Some Answers
June 10th, 2009Costa Rica Services Summit Coverage (The show is over, but the reporting continues!)
Officials from Cuba's DISAIC (Cristina Espinosa on left and Mayra Barreto) spoke optimistically about Cuba's emerging professional services sector. CRM Central Editor Kirk Laughlin joins them at the Costa Rica Services Summit.
The establishment of Cuba as an Nearshore services base for US corporations is not as outrageous as we might have thought only a year ago. Recent geopolitical shifts (including the recent wrangling over Cuba’s potential OAS membership, detailed here in Time Magazine) are revealing a genuine thaw between the US and Cuba with the potential removal of the “insane” embargo in place since 1960.
While I don’t plan to incite any political firestorms here, there are clearly some valid causes to encourage normalized trade relations with Cuba, cultivate technology transfer and enable Cuba to slowly develop a viable, long-term export services sector. Why? For the same reasons that apply to many of its Nearshore neighbors – from Panama to Nicaragua and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic – the inflow of foreign capital into economically distressed nations generally causes good things to happen. Jobs appear where they didn’t before, university students develop career aspirations that are based on realistic opportunity, knowledge workers develop specialized skills and foreign corporations begin to investigate the long-term value of initiating sourcing relationships.
Can this happen in Cuba? It’s not as insane as you might think.
I say that because I sat down with two Cuba government officials at the Costa Rica Services Summit, both of whom work for at DISAIC, a government agency focused on consulting with Cuba business to improve their technology infrastructure, HR, training and technical services. Sitting down for an interview was Cristina Ramirez Espinosa, marketing communications director and Mayra Sanchez Barreto, IT consulting director.
