The video features three Cuban women entrepreneurs sharing their experiences building businesses on the island, each navigating the unique challenges of Cuba’s economic environment with creativity and purpose.
Saily González Velázquez opens with a foundational definition of what it means to be an entrepreneur: the ability to identify problems, devise solutions, and work hard to bring about real change. She acknowledges the difficulty of the context — when a country is economically depressed, private businesses suffer alongside it — but frames this as precisely the reason entrepreneurship matters. Her venture, Amarillo Coworking, was born from five years of personal experience in the co-working world.
A business is something you do to make money — but entrepreneurship is done to generate value and create a positive impact on others.
She envisioned it as more than just office space: a place where people meet, collaborate, and avoid the isolation that entrepreneurship so often brings.
Adriana Heredia, founder of Beyond Roots, describes a community-based tourism venture in Guanabacoa, initially inspired by a wave of African-American tourists seeking to connect with their roots in ways that museums cannot provide. The project grew into a collaborative neighborhood platform, bringing local residents into the experience and helping visitors understand Cuban life from the inside. Within six months of launching their blog, Beyond Roots was already setting trends in digital communication in Cuba.
Katia Sánchez built La Penúltima Casa into one of Cuba’s pioneering digital marketing and content brands. Her key insight was that while many people talked about marketing in Cuba, very few translated it into the local context. Rather than selling directly, they generated value through content — and clients came to them naturally. During the pandemic, when many businesses began to struggle, Katia and her team created a digital communications course to help entrepreneurs find new paths. Shortly after, they launched a podcast inviting successful businesses to share their reinvention stories, offering others both practical examples and inspiration. La Penúltima Casa also expanded into Lo Afro, a shop conceived as a collaborative space selling products — many previously nonexistent in Cuba — aimed at a specific and underserved market.
On the question of being women in business, all three offer a nuanced perspective. Building teams with female leadership has felt natural and unproblematic. The real friction, when it appears, comes from outside — clients questioning their youth or experience. Yet the dominant reaction they receive is admiration, which becomes something to push back against. As one of them puts it directly: “I don’t want to be admired for it. I want it to be seen as normal — I am a woman, and I can do this.”
