Most residents work blue-collar jobs, installing insulation, working in the sugar-cane business or as nurse's aides and home-care workers.
The economy is diversified; textiles, tourism, sugar cane, banking, and business process outsourcing are the main sectors.
Ms. Rivera said La Lupe's career faded not only because of her personal tragedies -- a back injury required her to temporarily use a wheelchair and later to walk with a cane -- but because in business she trusted the wrong people and signed the wrong contracts.
He stopped to shake hands at the Saed Juice Shop, across from the bombed government complex on Omar al-Mukhtar Street, which was doing a brisk business pulverizing sugar cane sticks into a green froth, 75 cents per plastic cup.
After various jobs, he set up a business growing sugar cane at Las Manacas farm in Birán, near Mayarí, Oriente Province.
The man that owned that was an old man and everybody thought he used it as a cane, but he was in business". She pulled off a cork top to show the cane's hollow interior.
As our entourage was led around the island by "minders," we were made welcome and consistently told by everyone from business owners to cane cutters and master cigar rollers, "We don't blame the people of America.
Farm boys from a tiny county that once depended on sugar cane have perfected an ingenious business model for selling a semi-processed form of Mexican heroin known as black tar.
Slowly, he reclaimed the farm, which now does a brisk business in mangoes, sugar cane and cotton.
The play begins with three blind mice, in business suits, tapping their canes across the stage.
