Wine Law

430 WINE LAW entrepreneurship express the potential of the private sector in Cuba also in the growth of wine culture. 4. FOREIGN INVESTMENT: LEGISLATIVE BACKGROUND As of 2011, Cuba has seen a process of increasing and updating its economic model. In April of that year, the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy were approved, generating a growing normative production aimed at making feasible the transformations proposed for the Cuban economic model. These guidelines were modified in 2016. As a consequence of these transformations, cooperatives in the non-agricultural sector have emerged, and regulations for the exercise of self-employment have been reinforced. In this context, it is necessary to strengthen the market and the role of the contract, in the formulation of a more efficient and sustainable model. The implementation of the Guidelines brought, as a direct consequence, the approval of regulations for Economic Contracting (Decree-Law No. 304, dated 1 November 2012, “New regulations for Economic Contracting”, and Decree No. 310, dated 17 December 2012, regulating contracts types). These regulations have contributed to the process of transformations linked to the updating of the Cuban economic model and basically aimed at establishing regulations that recognised and provided greater contractual autonomy to the subjects of the contracts, contributing as well to an increase in their responsibility to fulfil their obligations. The Cuban legislation in force (Decree-Law No. 304, Article 1), when referring to the scope of application, specifies that this Decree-Law “is applicable to the contract understood as a legal act through which legal- economic relations of a mandatory nature are created, modified and extinguished, for the execution of a productive, commercial or service provision activity, in which both national natural and legal persons and foreign natural and legal persons that are domiciled, established or authorised to operate in the country intervene.”. The revitalisation of foreign investment is another of the areas strengthened in the last decade. At the end of 2013, a new policy was approved that already defines a more important role for foreign investment and has a sectoral approach. On the legal level, with the entry into force of Decree-Law No 313, the creation of the Mariel Special Zone for Development (MSZD) was approved.