Why are professionals in Cuba crazy about startups?

At the small Burner Brothers bakery in downtown Havana, an engineer decorates cookies and a lawyer frosts a cake. The bakery’s co-owner, Sandra Camacho Rodríguez, a dentist, greets customers.

Why would anyone trade a career, an office job, and a desk and chair for a heated restaurant kitchen or hours spent standing as a hotel concierge?

Money.

Across Havana, engineers, lawyers, dentists and other highly skilled professionals have abandoned government careers to take unglamorous but more lucrative jobs in the private sector, many of them start-ups.

These changes are in line with the trend prevailing in the country. President Obama easing trade policy with Cuba new policy from Havana and growth of entrepreneurship nationwide.

Serial entrepreneur and business strategist Marcus Lemonis explores this issue in a special episode of CNBC’s ” Profit in Cuba ”

Camacho, like most Cubans new to the private sector, is uncomfortable talking about her new salary. But she and her brother suggest that in a few days they will earn more than they did in a year.

“The steady flow of (bakery) traffic told me what I needed to know,” Lemonis says. “I think they were making at least $100 a day. That’s incredible, considering most Cubans live on $300 a year.”

Experts confirm the existence of this phenomenon.

“Many Cubans are leaving government jobs where they earn less than $30 a month,” says Richard Feinberg, author of the book Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy and a senior fellow at the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institute.

“The job with tips can easily exceed $300 a month, or 10 times what they earned in government departments.”

While the government may be facing an outflow of educated workers, the economy will likely benefit.

” Raul Castro this has made it easier for entrepreneurs because the government needs tax dollars to replace funds subsidized first by Russia and then by Venezuela,” says Tom Hayes, dean of the Williams College of Business at Xavier University.

Hayes has traveled to Cuba several times over the past few years.

“The Cuban people, like all of us, want the best for their families,” he says.

Watch CNBC’s special encore episode of “The Profit in Cuba” tonight at 7:00 PM/ET .

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