Jack,
Not much to object to in the article (scroll). I spent two weeks motorcycling in Cuba in 2013. I agree with most of the reflections of Rick Newman. Newman misses by not highlighting the ubiquitous, fabulous music of Cuba.
I lived in Miami for twelve years and have known many Miami based Cuban exiles. Castro confiscated the assets of these people and they have not been remunerated. Hence, perhaps, not being remunerated for their sequestered assets is key to their objection to restoration of normal US relations with Cuba.
First generation Cuban exiles are dying off in south Florida and the resistance among exiles and their progeny to normalized relations wanes. Our own forum member, talented, renowned, Rocky Rodriguez, Miami Republican personality and former General Counsel to Governor Jeb Bush may want to comment.
Miami philanthropist Shephard Broad (deceased) was founder and CEO of the S and L I ran in Miami between 1991 and 1995. At that time his ties with American Savings were severed but while I was CEO, I reached out to him to mine his knowledge about American Savings and the Miami scene. Six or eight times he invited me to Joes Stone Crab for lunch. Apart from Mezzanine (Jim Davidson), Shephard is the only person I've been to Joe's with who could walk right in and be immediately seated. At one of those lunches, he told me: "Steve, the city of Miami should build a monument in Bayfront Park to the man most responsible for Miami's success." "Who?" I responded. Shepard: "Fidel Castro."
Of course, Shepard meant that the Cuban exiles. forced by Castro to come to Miami in the late 50's, were Cuba's elite... Cuba's high achievers. They transformed Miami. Few are aware that at the time of the Cuban revolution, Cuba's per capita GDP was the highest in Latin America. I don't mean to say that that Cuba's economic output then was well distributed, but it is incontrovertible that the Cuban diaspora in Miami, which created Latin America's most successful economy, is also central to what Miami is today, a vibrant, exciting, fast paced, economically effervescent mélange of American aspiration and Latin elan. Miami today is the reciprocal of aging, declining, crime ridden US blue cities like San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York City. Credit the Cuban diaspora for making that happen. By the way, you see a similar phenomenon with the Vietnamese boat people in Orange County. Is there a lesson here about America's desperate need for targeted immigration, folks?
Well, I've kind of deviated from your question as to whether the US should normalize relations with Cuba. I'd say as long as the Cuban exiles have a strong position to take against normalization, I'd stand with them. Considering their success... their enormous contribution to Miami and the US, we need to listen to what they have to say.
Bishop
Note: My picto-diary of my Cuban trip in 2013 is here:
2013 - Cuba by Motorcycle | Stephen DeWitt Taylor
-----Original Message-----From: Jack Rubin <[email protected]>
To: Stephen D. Taylor <[email protected]>
Sent: Sat, Jan 21, 2023 8:22 am
Subject: Fwd: What Rick Newman learned about communism — and capitalism — in Cuba
Steve,
You are a very “international” person and you lived in Miami. Both of those would qualify you to have an informed opinion on Cuba. Given the brief column below, I am very interested in your thoughts.
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When I visited Cuba for the first time in early January, I packed all the stereotypes a know-it-all American capitalist would apply to a communist country.
There would be scarcities of basic products. Failing infrastructure. Low living standards. Frustrated ambition — and many other hallmarks of communal government that stifles private ownership and the profit motive.
Check, check, check, check, and check. But I discovered a lot of other things I didn’t expect.
Some of them help explain why the biggest exodus of Cubans since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution is now heading for the United States. But other capable Cubans are staying and trying to take advantage of loosening laws that allow them to start businesses and earn a profit.
There’s also widespread yearning for closer relations with the United States, blocked mainly by hardline Cuban-Americans in Florida who are de-facto arbiters of U.S. policy toward the largest nation in the Caribbean.
Here are seven surprises from an eye-opening trip to Cuba:
Russia's influence is fading. The Soviet Union backed Cuba from the 1960s until the USSR fell apart in 1991. That began a long period of economic isolation for Cuba, which intensified as COVID hit in 2020, wrecking Cuba’s tourism business, which has barely recovered. The Cuban economy is a mess, but that may also offer the best opportunity in years for closer ties with the United States.
"It's in the interest of the United States to open up because the Cubans clearly get nothing from Russian and nothing from China," says David Kotok, chairman of investing firm Cumberland Advisors, who led the group I traveled with. "Opening up step by step would benefit Americans and those in the United States who would like to do business with Cuba."
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Yahoo Finance columnist Rick Newman in Havana. (Credit: Rick Newman, Yahoo Finance)
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It sure doesn't feel like a terrorist state. The United States designates four nations as state sponsors of terrorism: Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba. In those first three countries, the governments would closely monitor, and perhaps hector or even jail, an American visitor. In Cuba, however, I moved around by myself, including long runs around the city, without ever feeling uncomfortable. If anybody was tracking me, I never noticed. The U.S. government has some reasons for keeping Cuba on the list, but they seem flimsy and arbitrary.
There's a burgeoning private sector. Cubans are now allowed to start businesses, earn a profit and accumulate wealth, within limits. "It used to be that talking about the private sector was like talking about the devil, capitalism," consultant Oniel Díaz Castellanos of the firm Auge Havana told the group I traveled with. "Now, there are more private companies than state-owned. It’s a huge change for a country like Cuba."
U.S. sanctions are a huge barrier for private-sector businesses. Cuba may have the world’s heartiest entrepreneurs, because they overcome hurdles many American business owners would find ruinous. I spoke with several businesspeople who described all kinds of problems caused by U.S. sanctions that have been in place since the 1960s. There’s a severe shortage of raw materials needed to make stuff inside Cuba, because U.S. sanctions block many imports. U.S. sanctions essentially block the convertibility of the Cuban peso into dollars or euros for international transactions and make it difficult or impossible to obtain credit. This means most Cubans buying imported goods have to pay cash, somehow. Of course, there’s a black market providing services that banks can’t. One business owner showed us how the black-market currency exchange works on the social-media app Telegram, where hundreds of buyers and sellers trade pesos, dollars, and euros.
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(Credit: Rick Newman, Yahoo Finance)
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Cubans really want to buy American stuff. Virtually everybody seems to feel this way, from the private sector, the government, and big state-owned companies. One government official griped about a fivefold increase in the cost of rice shipped from Asia since 2019, and said, "The normal thing would be for us to buy rice from the U.S., because it’s 90 miles away. But we can’t because of the blockade."
You can criticize the government. Many Cubans we met openly criticized the communist government for a variety of things: ubiquitous lines for food and gasoline, routine power outages, the dial-up quality of Internet service, clumsy policies that fail over and over to raise already low living standards. I asked one business owner what’s allowed, exactly. Apparently it’s okay to bash policies but riskier to criticize government individuals by name, which can garner a jail sentence.
There's a model for what Cuba might become. It's Vietnam. The United States suffered nearly 60,000 fatalities during the brutal war in Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s. Yet it restored trade relations with Vietnam in 1994, when it was still led by the communist government that effectively drove U.S. forces out. U.S. trade with Vietnam now includes $10 billion of exports per year $80 billion of imports. If the United States can do business with a former military foe on the other side of the world, it can certainly improve ties with a recovering Soviet sidekick just 90 nautical miles away.
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