The latest Bloomberg Businessweek suggests an interesting tool for battling Cuban communism: capitalism.

Yamina Vicente has lived in communist Cuba her whole life. But it didn’t take her long to learn one of capitalism’s handier skills: creating market demand.

Baby showers were practically unheard of in Cuba until last year, when Vicente started an event planning company called Decorazón. She learned about the gift-giving parties from American women visiting Cuba, then persuaded some of her clients in Havana to throw their own.

Now, arranging baby showers—albeit on the shoestring budgets of a country where the average monthly salary is $20—is one of Vicente’s most popular services. Another is planning Halloween bashes.

Recently, at the invitation of think tanks including Washington-based Cuba Study Group, Vicente and other Cuban entrepreneurs made unusual visits to Miami for tutoring from U.S. small business owners. During a break at a downtown restaurant, Vicente shifted her high-velocity Cuban Spanish into power-lunch gear. “I’ve got to do more than birthdays and weddings,” said Vicente, 31, a former Marxist economics teacher who wears the smart attire and determined attitude of a rookie real estate agent. “I’ve got to diversify.”

Such ambitions are a far cry from “socialism or death,” which Cuba’s former dictator, 88-year-old Fidel Castro, once plastered on billboards. Cuban socialism is a miserable failure, so instead of choosing economic death, Castro’s younger brother and successor, Raúl Castro, has decided he’s got to do more than statism and collectivism can accomplish.

He’s got to diversify.

If the U.S. really wants to help bring down the island’s repressive communist regime, it should chip away at it in Cuba, not just scream at it from Miami. That is, Washington should help Raúl by helping novice entrepreneurs like Vicente. “Their success will ultimately be our success,” says Tomas Bilbao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, which insists that engaging Cuba instead of isolating it is the best means of eventually democratizing it.