Cuba. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí   –  LMMIAMI.COM

• According to The Brookings Institution, Cuba is clearly trying to lure foreign investment.
• It might be yet another political maneuver by the Communist Party to buy time.
• However, this time it’s different.
• The party is over.
• The octogenarians will go soon.
• Duh.
• The conference “Oportunidades en Cuba” held recently in New York City and organized, among others, by the Wharton Business School attracted the presence of 240 business people.
• A survey conducted among attendees during said gathering calculated that as much as 12 billion dollars could be earmarked to be invested in the island in the next decade alone.
• Citibank, American Express & Mastercard announced in January their plans to start operating there.
• Netflix too.
• Even Airbnb has jumped onboard.
• I know from a very reliable source that a major telco is surreptitiously planning a massive, err, “air raid” into the island (wink wink nudge nudge)
• It ain’t no conjecture, it is fact.
• Forgive me for stating the obvious.
• Think of the possibilities in the automotive category alone.
• Roads, airports, utilities, sewage, you name it.
• Duh, duh, duh.
• Funny thing is, this is good AND bad for Miami.
• My bet is, gradually during the next couple years, we will witness a transition: Miami will slowly fade into the backseat while La Habana reclaims its place as the capital city of the Caribbean and necessary nexus between North & Latin America.
• Mark my words.
• That’s not it.
• I’ll make another prediction here.
• I’ll put my infallible, pristine reputation on the line.
• In a not so distant future there will be a juicy “Anglo Market” in Cuba.
• Yeah, a US Hispanic market in reverse.
• Why?
• For the same reason there are tons of American retirees and not so retirees living in, say, Costa Rica or San Miguel de Allende in México.
• Affordable quality of life.
• And freedom.
• Let’s not miss this boat.
• Let’s not forget either that the vast majority of locals were born and raised in a perverse environment of oppression, fear, hardship and scarcity.
• An abrupt immersion in our hard charging, freewheeling consumerist ways might make their already battered existential compass spin out of control.
• The likelihood of us exporting our most pervasive societal maladies (credit card-leveraged ghetto fabulousness, perennial indebtedness, legal & illegal substance abuse, obesity, disfiguring plastic surgery, tacky tattoos, asymmetric haircuts, acrylic nails) is quite high.
• The cultural collision will be tricky.
• A few years after the dictator Francisco Franco died and Spain became a democracy, the country confronted a grave epidemic of hard drug abuse, particularly heroine.
• It derailed the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young folks and their families.
• Too much freedom too soon can drive people nuts, particularly for the younger segments of the population.
• Freedom can be messy.
• Sounds a bit paternalistic but the likelihood of such a scenario is high.
• Handle with care.
• Nevertheless, the outlook is positive.
• The nightmare will be over soon.
• So why do foreign policy hawks keep kicking & screaming?
• Hawks don’t seem to care, for instance, that the ultimate totalitarian state –China- manufactures pretty much every single SKU on America’s aisles & shelves.
• Not only that, China is America’s second largest sovereign lender of last resort (Japan surpassed it last week but it’s just a wrinkle in the overall trend).
• Why are hawks so upset about the thawing relations with Cuba then?
• Two explanations come to mind:
• 1)    Cuba is an easy target to score political points.
• 2)    The Cuban communist party is too broke to make campaign donations
• At the end of WWII, FDR, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill had to suck it up & smile for the cameras hand in hand with none other than Joseph Stalin, the Soviet strongman who’d go down in history as an even worse mass-murder than the defeated führer.
• Twice: at Yalta & Postdam.
• The world had already seen too much devastation.
• It was a necessary compromise to stop the carnage, at least west of the iron curtain.
• Politics is a nasty job.
• Somebody has to do it.
• Sure, it ain’t easy to ask cold-blooded pragmatism from someone who had to flee his or her homeland and see their lives wrecked by a bunch of lunatic psychopaths in fatigues.
• Justice must and will be served eventually.
• Better late then never.
• Patience pays.
• Easier said than done, I know.