Alan Gomez

USA TODAY

MIAMI — As the United States prepares to enter a new era in its relations with Cuba, it will encounter an island that has undergone significant economic changes in the past few years.

Since taking control of the government from an ailing Fidel Castro in 2008, Cuban President Raúl Castro has implemented a series of economic changes that have shifted more than 500,000 workers from the state-run economy to private enterprises. For the first time, Cubans can buy and sell their homes and their cars. Castro asked for suggestions on how to improve the economy shortly after assuming power, leaving a population used to taking orders more willing to openly express their reservations.

"When you go to Cuba now, the services are better," Elaine Diaz, 29, a professor at the University of Havana who is studying at Harvard, said of the new class of private business owners. "There are more restaurants, places to fix your computer, more recreational activities. There's even paintball tournaments in the middle of Havana, something we never saw before."

Cubans say one thing that's definitely not changed is Cuba's human rights record: the constant crackdown on dissidents or anyone deemed a threat to the communist regime.

"They keep beating men and women. They keep traumatizing people who fight for human rights. They keep terrorizing the Cuban people," said Yris Perez Aguilera, 39, a prominent dissident visiting Miami. She estimates she's been arrested at least 100 times during marches and other protests.

For most of the time after Fidel Castro's rise to power in 1959, the government has controlled nearly every aspect of Cuban life, especially the economy. From hotels to restaurants, from farming to factories, everything was centrally planned by the government, leaving only an extensive black market for people to trade on their own.

Shortly after Raúl Castro took over, he started instituting changes that were unthinkable under his older brother's rule. One of the biggest changes came in 2011, when the government allowed people to buy and sell their homes. Even though there was never a housing market in Cuba — people lived in their family homes and moved only in rare circumstances — one suddenly emerged.

Pedro Freyre, a Cuban-born attorney who lives in Miami and chairs the international practice at the Akerman law firm, said Cubans started posting notes on trees in the middle of a central park in Havana advertising their homes. "They would say, 'Three bedrooms, view of the ocean, the roof hasn't caved in yet,'" Freyre said.

Soon after, real estate agents were born. "They'd go from one tree to another saying, 'Hey, did you see this, did you see that?' " Freyre said.

Already known for turning just about any collection of wood, metal and Styrofoam into a boat capable of floating the 90 miles to the USA, Cubans have shown their ingenuity in many ways. A Cuban version of Craigslist appeared. People started making gym equipment out of discarded metal and bottles filled with sand for weights.

"It was like watching seeds grow in the desert," Freyre said.

Yet there remain major limitations on the private sector. The government continues adjusting the tax structure. People who want to start their own business have to choose from a list of about 200 jobs allowed to be created, and most are in the low-level service industry, such as restaurants.

Aside from rare exceptions, people who want to start a business require financial help from abroad. Around the same time that Cuba opened its private sector, President Obama lifted the caps on remittances that Cubans in the USA could send back to their relatives. In 2012, Cuban Americans sent $2.6 billion to relatives in Cuba, according to the Miami-based Havana Consulting Group. By 2013, that amount rose to $3.5 billion.

"That is what provided the capital and the material inputs for a lot of these (businesses)," said Christopher Sabatini, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "You wouldn't have had one without the other."

Cubans say that has further separated people in Cuba, intensifying a class system that for so long had been quiet. People with money from abroad can not only open a business and make more money, they can move out of their neighborhood to a nicer part of town.

"I haven't seen a regular Cuban be able to buy their own car or buy their own house," Perez Aguilera said. "The country now exists in two worlds."

Whatever progress has been made in the economic realm matters little to Cubans who say they face constant repression.

Many Republicans in Congress responded to Obama's new plan with anger, partly because it required no changes on the part of the Cuban government on its human rights record. The White House pointed to the 53 political prisoners released as part of the deal.

According to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, the number of political prisoners detained in Cuba has risen from 2,074 in 2010 to 6,424 in 2013. Through the first 11 months of 2014, that number is at 8,410.

Diaz said those numbers could be even higher, but the Cuban government has devised ways to keep them low. For example, rather than arresting, prosecuting and sending someone to prison, Diaz said, authorities hold them without charge for short periods of time, which accomplishes the same goal in a different way.

"You don't put someone in prison for 15 years, but every time they go out in the street, you detain them," Diaz said.

Perez Aguilera says Cuban authorities started employing another method in recent months. She said whenever she's been arrested recently while marching with her group in central Cuba, known as the Rosa Parks Women's Movement for Civil Rights, they've taken all her belongings and dumped her in another city or a sugar cane field.

"They want to show the world that in Cuba, they don't arrest us, they don't beat up women," she said. "So they do that."

Those two realities — a slowly expanding economy and an ever-present security apparatus — show the difficulty Obama will face in moving to normalize relations with Cuba.

"Obama and Castro aren't going to get along on everything, but they're trying to get something out of each other," Sabatini said. "That's the way diplomacy works."