Airbnb, a leading home-rental company, has finally brought the sharing economy born in capitalism to communist Cuba. Obama’s move to relax cold war-era travel restrictions influenced the online development of the country. Airbnb was quick to benefit from such opportunities and started to cooperate with Cuba’s many hosts who have long rented out homes and rooms to foreign guests.

The Cuban government always encouraged private homes to serve tourists in order to promote tourism without the costs of hotels. After cooperating with them, Airbnb can launch services in Cuba with more than 1,000 listings, which include everything from colonial homes to terraced bedrooms and spare rooms in normal homes. The price is very attractive – usually less than $50. Although the hosts have to pay Airbnb a fraction of their fees, they expand to previously nonexistent marketplace in return.

The matter is that Cubans got used to a perpetually broken phone system and rare and expensive access to the Internet. This is why it turned out that Airbnb has jumped first into a unique and virtually empty market – in contrast to other companies, who can only provide phone numbers and emails for Cuban rentals, Airbnb books reservations right away.

Airbnb also revealed that it saw a 70% rise in searches for listings in Cuba after Obama’s move in January. Apparently, the company has an opportunity to start fresh in Cuba with a government newly open to US businesses. At the moment, its services in Cuba are available only to Americans because of the US trade embargo which prohibits offering listings to others.

By the way, other travel companies also show interest in offering services in Cuba: for example, flight and hotel website Kayak and the airliner Sun Country, which launched charter flights from New York to Havana. Netflix, a popular streaming service, also announced the launch of its services in the country.