Cuba. Part 2
April 21, 2015
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.