Some of the Florida Cubans are descendants of Battista’s elite, and I would be surprised if they didn’t make a serious grab for all the goodies once Cuba opens up.
I would add to that, not only do Cubans in Miami know a lot about Cuba from local media, a great number of them are fairly recent arrivals from Cuba. I’m looking for a cite with numbers.
Ok, found this in wiki:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=7487162&subscription=0
The numbers in 1000’s for Cubans in the US are:
1970 - 439
1980 - 608
1990 - 737
2000 - 952
Cite? Please? I’ve yet to run across any of these “Batista’s elite”, or their descendants. Are these like the Cuban version of the Elders of Zion?
[Chevy Chase]
And this breaking news just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
[/Chevy Chase]
Are you sayuing that after the fall of Battista a lot of the people who were on top in Cuban society didn’t head over to Florida? 'Cause that’s what I’ve always heard. And that’s the way this educational site tells it:
How serious? With guns and such? That might end up getting U.N. Peacekeepers involved, trying to keep Cuba from turning into another Somalia. I can see them buying up large chunks of Cuban land, sold by people who, finally given a chance to get the heck outta there, get the heck outta there, but I don’t envision the U.S. casually standing by while a number of citizens become active participants in a civil war that close to U.S. territory.
Heck, if it does go Wild West, I can imagine me and a bunch of army buddies, none of whom have any ancestral ties to Cuba, heading down there with a boatload of C7s and C9s and grabbing our own piece of tropical beach property. Lock, load and party!
Canada has (among other things) a joint operation nickel plant in El Oriente (near Holguin), but unlike in other countries it’s a fifty-fifty deal. That is to say, the “first world” country doesn’t take all the capital out of the “third world” country; the two countries share the “profits.”
So however Raul Castro fares, I’d bet those things will continue, and as noted above, it’s unlikely that rum makers et al will get their interests back. It is indeed an interesting question. The Cubans I’ve talked to (in Cuba, not in Miami) easily recognize the problems and corruption with Castro’s system, but they also recognize that very well indeed that they are not puppets of the U.S. They are politically very astute.
On the SDMB we’ve talked about foreign investments before, even from the U.S.. But the issue that Cuba will become another Cancun disturbs me, personally. Cancun is soulless, a black hole for U.S. dollars; Cuba has a rich cultural history, especially with its music.
And among those who spend in Cuba, don’t leave out the Italians. They’re all over Habana. Everyone thinks I’m Italian when I go there.
Batista, one t, fell in 1958. What I am saying is that 50 years after the fall of Batista there are not a whole lot of people around not in Century Village or the nearest cemetery who were on top of Cuban society back them. Consequently their ability to influence the future of Cuban life is minimal.
Take a look at the migration numbers I posted above, the bulk of the Cuban migration has occured since the 1970’s, by which time there were no Batista supporters alive in Cuba.
I think Evil Captor is talking about groups like Alpha 66 who were active in the 60’s and 70’s. Those guys are mostly dead.
As for people buying property, they would have no one to buy from. No one in Cuba, except the government, holds title to any property.
I don’t think we need to worry about Cuban culture surviving the death of Castro, it certainly thrived before he made the scene.
As to the point of Cuba nto being the economic pocket of the US, that is an interesting conundrum. The embargo is mostly responsible for keeping the US money out of Cuba, which in turn has created the non-US based economy Cuba has. It would be naive to think that when the embargo is lifted an economy the size of the US would not immediately swallow, for all intents and purposes, the entire Cuban economy.
Castro came to power in 1959. Let’s see. That’s, hmm, carry the two, 47 years ago. The very few Batista cronies left are octogenarians. They aren’t going to be leading invasion forces any time soon. Any invasion force would be the sons and grandsons of the Batista cronies. But being the son or grandson of an ex-Batista crony doesn’t exactly make your dreams of a Cuban invasion anything more than hot air.
Any half assed “invasion” of Cuba by the sons and grandsons of the Cuban exiles will be foiled by the FBI before it gets beyond barroom bluster. It would have the same chance of success as Vietnamese exiles staging an invasion of Vietnam. Even less, Vietnam fell in 1975, only 31 years ago.
Unless it were the CIA organizing it.
I know that would be completely insane, but remember what kind of administration we’re living under right now.
Except it’s clear that the career CIA people hate the Bush administration, and vice-versa. So if Bush wants to invade Cuba, he’s gonna cut the CIA out of the picture completely. They’ll find out about it when they read about it in the Washington Post.
Except Bush isn’t going to send the marines to Cuba, Cheney’s not gonna let him. So since open invasion is out, CIA backed covert invasion is out, where does that leave the grandchildren of the Cuban exiles?
Why not?
I don’t think they’d even bother, though your point about the nature of the current administration is well taken.
Good point, but when I talk about the “Canunization” of of Habana it does not necessarily mean swallowing the culture. I just hate places like Cancun which are not much more than destinations for drunken college student during spring break; if you were Ernest Hemmingway, would you want to live in Cancun?. The point is not that such a change would take away all culture of the place, it just would make it somewhat annoying to go there. In fact, for me, the best thing about going to Cuba is that nobody assumes that I’m from the States, (they always assume I’m Italian), and there are no drunken college students.
Well, two, actually. 
Assuming the death of Castro starts a slight lean in the direction of privatization, I expect lots of money (much of which will take the form of bribes of government officials, who I’ll bet will only take U.S. dollars) to pour in.
That’s very interesting, something that had never ever occurred to me.
There’s a small group of Canadians pining for a tropical territory of some sort, but the place that always gets mentioned is the Turks and Caicos Islands, a UK territory. The UK coyuld just give it to us, with the permission of the inhabitants, and I understand that Nova Scotia has passed a resolution to admit the islands as part of that province, so we wouldn’t even have to mess with the Constitution to add a new province.
But Cuba! Canadians have been going down there for years, ever since the Trudeau days. Perhaps we should keep a closer eye on events there. And who knows… maybe someday there will be free passage and transfer of residency, even something like sovereignty-association! 
I think there’s quite a lot we North Americans could learn from Cuba, especially how to deal with decreasing energy supplies and still keep things going.
Permaculture Activist magazine had an article a while back detailing how Cuba dealt with the ending of Soviet subsidy after the Soviet Union collapsed. For example, Cuba started up nationwide localised organic farming and gardening, even in the cities, to replace the imports of oil, food and fertiliser they no longer received from Russia. For a while it was touch and go, and everyone lost weight, but they survived.
We may have to deal with something like that if oil supplies are interrupted. Yes, even us in Canada. The East Coast gets its oil by import–it is not connected to the West. Albertan exports pay for the imports.
I want to go to Cuba before Castro dies, if only to see what one of the last two places on earth without McDonald’s looks like. And it’s a lot closer and easier for me to get to than North Korea.
I take it you haven’t been to Varadero during Canadian spring break!
Would a horny, hard-drinking bastard like Hemingway want to live in a place with a limitless supply of liquor and bikini-clad coeds? Quite a poser . . . I’ll get back to you . . .