When Omar Fonseca got the call that Airbnb wanted to meet with him in Havana this winter, he could hardly believe it.

“Are you sure? Airbnb?” he excitedly asked the client who had called to tell him the news.

Omar Fonseca’s travel agency in Cuba coordinates online listings on behalf of homes that rent rooms. Now he posts them on Airbnb, too.

For the past five years, Fonseca had been building a business in Cuba that was not unlike Airbnb. In a country where most residents are not allowed to have private Internet access, his company connects casas particulares, the name for houses that rent rooms to travelers, with the Internet. He posts the homes on websites, communicates with foreign travelers via email, and then communicates their reservation requests to house owners by telephone. “I try to study the market all the time,” he says. “I try to read all the time. So I knew Airbnb.”

Airbnb’s team had just learned about Fonseca, and they were at least as excited to meet him as he was to meet them. At the time, they were working out how an Internet company that facilitated credit card transactions could launch in a country where most people don’t have Internet access and do business entirely in cash–a task they initially thought might require phone support to relay bookings or some type of SMS-based app. Existing travel agencies like Fonseca’s changed the calculus entirely.

Cuba, unlike most places where Airbnb operates, already has a licensed industry that revolves around private homes renting out rooms to travelers. Most of these houses find clients by word of mouth, and referral fees are so common that there’s a business license for people who do nothing but refer tourists to casas particulares. Fonseca charged those same referral fees, but he found his tourist clients online and through relationships with foreign travel agencies instead of on the street. He had started by booking reservations for 10 houses owned by friends, using an Internet connection available to him through his work as a human resources professional. But by literally going door to door as he visits new areas in Cuba, he has built a portfolio of more than 900 houses, each of which pays him a fee if he finds them people who book reservations. “For us, it’s very important that our owners know our team personally,” Fonseca says. “We see that it generates a real trust relationship.”

Instead of building this trust firsthand, Airbnb could find people like Fonseca; they were already helping casas particulares communicate online with potential clients. By launch, Airbnb had found eight of them. “It wasn’t about doing something new,” says Jordi Torres Mallol, Airbnb’s general manager for Latin America. “It was about plugging into something existing.”

Casa particular owner and Airbnb host Armando Unsain flips through a book he uses to make referrals to other houses that rent rooms.

Once paired up with Airbnb, Fonseca gathered his two partners and five employees in a private house in Trinidad, and they started making calls. Casas particulares are accustomed to being paid on the spot in cash, and some were suspicious of a system that required them to wait. But Fonseca had worked with many of these houses for years. They trusted him. “I’d call and say that the most important travel agency in the world is coming to Cuba,” he says.