HAVANA — Niuris Higueras jokes that her spouse calls Atelier — the Havana restaurant she started with her brother — her real husband.

In an effort to see her family more, she’s decided to move them into the rooms in the back of her popular restaurant in the city’s Vedado neighborhood. It already has a homey atmosphere with crocheted tablecloths, louvered shutters and an eclectic decor featuring old radios, typewriters and other antiques.

One sure sign that the restaurant may be eating up a bit too much family time: “My son is only 7 years old and he knows how to make chocolate fondue and cheesecake,” Higueras said.

As Cuban entrepreneurs negotiate the twists and turns of private business on the island, they’ve found a few new challenges: stress and trying to achieve work-life balance.

They also find themselves grappling with pressing questions such as these: How do I keep this ancient Russian washing machine running so I can wash the towels at my bed and breakfast? Where am I going to buy hair dryers for my guest rooms? Where can I source duck for my restaurant menu? How do I get my products to market?

And then there are the big question marks: Why hasn’t Cuba developed a meaningful wholesale market where I can find the products I need to run my business? What will the new relationship with the United States mean for Cuba’s private sector?

“There are so many problems you have to confront daily,” Higueras said. Because her menu includes dishes such as conejo en vino (rabbit in wine sauce) and duck confit in a country where such fare is not readily available, she’s been working for the past 15 years with a private farmer in Pinar del Rio who keeps the restaurant stocked with fowl and rabbit.

She’s also vexed by a government regulation that limits paladares, private restaurants, to just 50 seats. “Without that restriction, we could have grown more rapidly,” she said.

The rules for cuentapropistas, Cuba’s self-employed, are gradually evolving. The government recently allowed operators of paladares, for example, to do home food delivery without taking out a new license. But Higueras said that doesn’t help her much. Her restaurant caters to foreign visitors and Cubans on special occasions. Her food is too expensive for most Cubans to have delivered on a regular basis, she said.

In this new world of cuentapropistas, almost any location can become a place of business — the front step of a home, the courtyard of an apartment building or even a stairwell. On Havana’s Acosta Street, one enterprising individual has moved a computer and a small table into a nook by the stairs of a building and is using it to resell packages of televised sports events, news, websites and entertainment programs from abroad that are copied on to a customer’s portable hard drive or USB.

While some cuentapropistas are engaged in little more than subsistence activities, others over time have built thriving businesses that provide jobs for other Cubans.

Some were almost accidental entrepreneurs. Julia de la Rosa and her husband, Silvio Ortega, run a bed and breakfast in the south Havana neighborhood of La Vibora that now has 10 guest rooms. “We were pushed to begin this activity. Twenty years ago, this country was in the middle of an economic crisis (after the collapse of the Soviet Union)” said de la Rosa. “As Cubans, the only resource that many of us had were our homes.”

The house, a 1938 mansion the couple inherited from Silvio’s aunt who left Cuba, appears to be quite a substantial resource. Guests splash in a large turquoise pool, have breakfast in a covered pavilion and sleep in stylish rooms with exposed brick walls, patterned tile floors, white linens, handcrafted furniture and flat-screen televisions.

But when the couple got the mansion, it was a wreck. Little of the furniture was functional, and the pool had been closed.

At the time, Ortega was a taxi driver who squired tourists around the city in a 1929 Ford. Drawing from his earnings, the couple slowly began to fix up the house and turn it into La Rosa de Ortega bed and breakfast.

It’s taken two decades of refinishing furniture — including some pieces tossed at the side of the road — commissioning Cuban craftsmen to make the iron beds and other furniture for the guest rooms, scouring Havana and historic Trinidad for tiles and antiques and finding parts for the swimming pool filtration system.

Having adequate wholesale markets where the couple could have purchased everything from construction materials to bedding would have made the whole process a lot easier, said de la Rosa. When she couldn’t find the hair dryers she needed for the guest rooms, she made a trip to Miami and brought them back in her suitcase.

Many entrepreneurs say they hope the opening with the United States will eventually make it easier to import the products they need for their businesses and that such luggage commerce won’t be their only alternative.

In the meantime, the cuentapropistas try to overcome bumps in the road. One of the big ones is lack of good Internet connections to communicate with suppliers and take reservations.

“We need real, normal access to email,” Ortega said. Now, Cubans with nauta.cu accounts can send emails within Cuba. “We’re so hungry for more — that’s not enough,” he said. “Internet is absolutely essential for our business. We need more freedom in many things — from Internet to normal exchanges with American citizens.”

To manage, he said his wife goes to hotels or hot spots outside hotels — anywhere she can find to log on and connect for a short time.