Cuba doesn’t work well. Without the USSR to overpay for Cuban sugar its economy is based on (1) export of overseas medical care and (2) tourism. 2020 pretty much killed tourism. Since 2020, Cuba’s seen the largest out-migration, especially of the young, since the Revolution. It is now an aging society that has lost a lot of its smartest young, doctors, teachers, engineers, baseballistas, who look at the internet and see better places.
The flip side is that our embargo is stupid, and Biden has only kept it in place because his one vote margin in the Senate depended on Menendez. You can pretty much go to Cuba at will, but you can’t legally bring back a bottle of rum and a dozen cigars. What’s more, when you go to Havana, it has some of the most magnificent Spanish colonial architecture in the world, and it’s rotting. People live in buildings where half is occupied and half is collapsed. If it weren’t for the two countrys’ disagreements, those buildings would see massive renovation for vacation homes, and massive inflow of dollars. The place has great bones.
The Cubans who remain love their country. It’s not easy, but they are proud of it, just like we are proud of ours. It’s difficult, but they’re Cuban. Like I said, it’s a very strange place. The fishing is good though.
I did some work in Bulgaria as the Russians moved out when the Iron Curtain fell. 1) They were jerks about it and stole and took back to Russia anything that was not bolted down. Absolutely pillaged the place. But, 2) the architecture. Sophia, the “Paris of the East”, was magnificent. Because the Russians invested nothing into the place, it was like an architectural time capsule from their 1920’s - 30’s heyday. And, international development swooped in and did a great job preserving and updating all of this opulence because the bones were worth it. The Bulgarians had done just enough to keep the stuff from falling down during the Russian occupation.
They don’t do a whole hell of a lot of this and from what I saw when I was there it’s central to the country’s economic problems. Irrespective of how many young people have left, it is a very, very young country, and most of the youth (and a staggering number of adults) spend their days sitting around doing nothing. I mean, Yo, jefe, let’s turn the muffuggin internet on, huh? Are the people going to be able to read stuff you don’t want them to read? Most likely. Are they going to waste time looking at all those pictures of sexy divans and whatnot? They’re already wasting time. Let’s fire this thing up and start learning coding, AI, SEO, digital marketing, whatever else people do to make money on the internet these days. Hell, Only Fans, why not, you get a nice cubana sitting astride a cushiony recliner and the hard currency prints itself.
It really wouldn’t be all that terribly difficult to turn Cuba into an approximation of a modern economy if someone over there felt like doing it. In the mean time, I strongly encourage anyone who’s interested to visit before those people wise up and and there are suddenly McDonalds on every corner and idiots like me are swarming the place buying rehabbed houses in el Vedado. The architectural wealth is off the charts, and it’s the only place I can think of where the poorly maintained buildings are at least as deeply stirring as the ones is pristine condition.
The people are cool, the food is great (where it comes from I have no idea because it sure as hell isn’t in any of the food markets I ever stumbled across), tons of art, baseball, beaches, music… Hopefully President Harris will lift the embargo and the country will get a nice, friendly push towards what I’m talking about.
It was a very young country. Now it’s not. In 1975, the median age was about 22, in 1985 about 25, in 1995 about 29. In 2023 it’s over 41, older than the US, and that’s in a country where the life expectancy is 67. Cuba has a population of about 11.2 million, and in the last three years has lost about 1 million to migration, most of them young. It has profoundly changed the country.