Ok LaLenin you reckon that the trickledown effect will not work for the average Cuban
I’m not that convinced, I can think of a few ways of injecting affluence rather than effluence into the Cuban economy
Fashion is fast but fickle
There are fecund minds around here - anyone got some ideas ?
I’m not sure I follow the rest of your post, so let me just reply to this part.
Everyone in Cuba works for the government, there are no private employers. Even those who work for foreign companies,(I used to for instance), do not collect a salary from the foreign company. Instead the company pays the Cuban government in dollars, and the Cuban employee is paid in Cuban pesos. In my case, I think MIC was charging between $20-$30 an hour for me and I was getting paid 220 Cuban pesos a month. At the time the dollar-peso exchange was 20:1. In other words I was working 180 hours a month, getting paid for 11, and the Cuban government pocketed the difference.
That’s one reason I think foreign investment will not affect the average Cuban.
I think this pdf has what you’re looking for, but I am having no luck downloading it. It’s in spanish but from what I can see in the html preview it has some charts that seem to have what you’re looking for.
The real thing is getting low level income into Cuba, my marketing punch would be to set up a VW plant there making ‘fake beetles’
Paying off the government is easy, the interesting problem is turning the place into a willing 51st state - from the ground up.
Ok, finally downloaded, not that I can make any sense of it it has all kinds of statistical jargon which is like chinese to me.
It does however have a nice graph, (Figura 1. Producto Interno Bruto en logaritmo (LPIB), more or less: Figure 1. Gross National Product in logarithm), which seems to indicate that GDP peaked in 1988, and bottomed out in 1993. By 2003, the last date in the graph it was almost back up to 1988 levels.
Despite how difficult to read the document is, this is pretty interesting information that 1. I never saw in Cuba, and 2. I didn’t even know existed. Thanks PBear42, you’ve fought my ignorance successfully.
Aren’t you in the UK? Why not go for british comonwealth status for Cuba instead? Sort of a Bahamas-Cuba-Jamaica-Cayman Islands protectorate, it’s a natural.
I assumed your post was in jest.
Thing is, economic statistics for totalitarian states are pretty much worth the paper their printed on. There’s no necessary connection between what the government reports and what actually occurs. So after the fall of the Soviet Union we saw that almost every economic statistic was manipulated for both internal and external propaganda reasons, and also for butt-covering reasons. If your factory is supposed to produce 1 million shoes and you only produce 500,000, a fudge in the paperwork can prevent you from getting some nasty payback. And you collude with both your suppliers and customers to cook the books to keep everyone out of trouble.
Now, FRDE, I’m not sure what you’re going on about. Sure, Cuba has a supply of cheap labor, but so do lots of Carribean islands. Why is Cuba more attractive than other places? Cheap labor is as common as dirt across Latin America, Africa, India, Asia, the Middle East.
And the answer is the Cuban government. No other government in Latin America can guarantee to keep a lid on the workers and keep everything out of the international media and have any chance of being taken seriously.
lalenin, thank you for the research. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get it to open, nor was I able to find it via the home page (all sub-pages of which take forever to open), but I’ll take your summary for discussion purposes.
As you recognize - and kudos for having the intellectual honesty to say it - this report suggests there’s not a bunch of extra money floating around today that The Regime could have trickled down to the people if it cared about them. So, that no addtional value has trickled down doesn’t tell us much about whether they care.
Also, there’s a wrinkle which occurred to me today thinking about this which cuts both ways, i.e, against your position and against mine. Today, unlike the economy with Soviet subsidies, there are capital investments which have to be serviced. That is, some of the money made has to be paid back to the investors who funded, e.g., the hotels and telecommunications infrastructure. That’s money not available for trickle down, even were The Regime inclinded to use it that way. This cuts against your position, because it means the economy, on a net basis, is worse off. It cuts against mine because this would continue to be true, even get worse, if sanctions were lifted and borrowing were increased.
Further, there’s the obvious problem that planned economies have a poor track record. Partly because they’re not efficient at figuring out what stuff to produce (politics intrudes), partly because they’re not good at motivating workers (your payment experience is an excellent example) and partly because the distribution of income tends to be skewed in favor of the planners. So, even if the embargo were lifted, there’s no assurance the Cuban economy would be developed productively, nor that such development would benefit the people.
Even with these reservations, I submit that the case for lifting the embargo is compelling. First, it has failed in its purpose of destabilizing The Regime and there’s no reason to believe it ever will succeed. On the contrary, as you acknowledge, it indirectly supports The Regime by giving it a scapegoat. Second, at a minimum, lifting the embargo would enable Cuban-Americans to visit family freely and to send aid. Neither actually solves the problem, but both would be good things. I suspect that were it possible to take a vote of the Cuban people on whether to end the embargo, most would vote yes, mainly for these two reasons. Third, I accept that lifting the embargo won’t necessarily improve the economy. Indeed, for the reasons just mentioned, it might have no effect at all (especially as experienced by the people). But, it might work, and the possibility that lifting the embargo might help the people - as against the certainty that it accomplishes nothing (except giving The Regime a scapegoat) - is good enough reason to drop it. Fourth, looking at it from a strictly selfish American perspective, this policy is an international embarrassment. Repeatedly condemned, for example, by hugely lopsided votes of the UN General Assembly. Dropping the embargo would be a small step towards saying we respect world opinion.
I should have made myself clearer.
I’ve a distinct aversion to economies based on tourism, possibly because I once worked in marketing for a tour operator, also perhaps because I studied economics at Uni.
I’ve a strong suspicion that Cuban exports would command a price premium in the USA.
The fact that the government is the sole employer rather surprized me, the logistics must be difficult. I need to think about that.
While I was exaggerating, Cuba potentially has a lot more in common with the USA than say Jamaica or the Bahamas - the same goes for South America, which I anticipate will gradually merge into the USA, rather as Europe has been expanding, not because labour is cheaper, but because it is easier having similar societies on ones borders.
It doesn’t seem to have been mentioned yet, but as far as I know there are still American citizens alive who have had property stolen by Castro without any restitution. It seems to me that the entire offence focuses personally on Castro, and when he’s gone it will be much easier to forgive and forget.
To clarify, the American interests expropriated were mostly corporate interests, except for various casinos owned by gangsters. But it was the corporate expropriations, together with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which drove US policy. The Cuban-Americans who lost personal property (and lots of it) were mostly Cuban at the time, becoming American citizens later, after fleeing to the US. See Wiki on Cuba and the embargo article cited upthread.
Just so long as they understand that no post-Castro Cuban government is going to restore any of that property to them, and the U.S. government is not going to force the issue.
I disagree. The time to drop the sanctions was in 1991. The sanctions forced the Soviet Union to expend precious resources to prop up the Cuban economy, and starved Cuba of funds it needed to export revolution in Central America. I was fine with sanctions until the Soviet Union fell.
Since then, sanctions have been counter-productive. They hurt the U.S. economy, they hurt the Cuban economy, and they push Cuba away from the U.S. sphere of influence and towards thugs like Chavez.
The sanctions should be dropped, but trade could have enough strings attached that it couldn’t be used as a weapon by the Cuban regime to reward cronies and punish dissidents. Open up trade, and you’ll help drive change in Cuba.
I don’t think this issue is just going to go away. We’re not talking about a few thousand dollards worth of land or goods. We’re talking about property worth many millions of dollars, and since the Cuban government has partnered with private entities from other countries, like Sol Melia from Spain, to develop and run these properties it is no longer a question of the Cuban government alone restoring property to its former owners or paying compensation.
I agree that Cuba has a lot of potential for business development, but infrastructure is seriously lacking, so initial investment cost is likely to be high.
As for tourism based economy, Cuba does have an agricultural base, however today at least that base is mostly a monoculture of sugar cane, equally vulnerable in my opnion.
Exactly. Many millions of dollars. Too much for the Cuban government to give up; even with foreign help it comes out the loser. Practically all property in Cuba was in private hands before the revolution, wasn’t it? Remember also that if the Communist system falls we can reasonably expect a pinata like when the Sandinistas lost power in Nicaragua or the Communists in Russia: Valuable state property will be privatized, but high-ranking party officials will be first in line to get a slice. Until that day, they won’t do anything that might make the pie smaller.
Surely we (or is it you plural) have learnt from Russia - one can skip the privitisation stage
As long as they reckon that they have a safe slice of the cake, then they’ll co-operate - especially if they know that the ‘cake’ means nothing to the USA, it is just symbolic.
The thing is that the USA can turn Cuba into a thriving 51st State with very little effort, it would then become an example to South America.
Personally I would start shoving money into preserving the architecture, construction is a rather good way of ‘sprinkling’ wealth and it can be done via Spain.
Look at how Germany sorted out DDR property problems, quietly but effectively.
Also LaLenin, Cuba could become a major exporter of Organic Blueberries (whatever they are) - the place has brand potential.
My view is that Castro has been holding the USA out as a threat, and sadly the USA has been doing exactly the same thing.
If I missed it in scanning this long thread, I apologize. But why does anyone assume that Cubans, absent Castro, would want normalized relations with the U.S.? We don’t get many peeks inside their society, but from what little I have seen, the average Cuban doesn’t see any advantage in a relationship with their neighbor to the north, who they always regarded as a bully. Haven’t they done reasonably well selling their cigars and sugar cane on other world markets (and a few cigars to Americans on the black market)? The Cubans who are still there, but who want to be here, are the ones who might welcome a change in American policy, but the majority may not want to go back to the days of Bautista, casinos, and free-flowing American dollars into the gambling establishments and flesh pots of their country.
It seems to me that most of the Cubans who hate Cuba as it is and long for Cuba as it was are already American citizens. The relative handful who would still like to be Americans will keep coming as before, whether we change our policy or not.
And of course I may be completely wrong. Your turn.
Larry
This has no chance at all of happening. Even the population of a country like Puerto Rico, with much tighter historical ties to the US has no desire to become a US state. Do you think that Cubans with the antagonistic history with the US, which predates Fidel, would opt for statehood?
Well, the Cuban government has been lobbying long and hard to have the embargo lifted. At every rally, in every publication, in just about every aspect of Cuban life there’s some official mention of the embargo being the root of all evils. I think it’s safe to assume most Cubans would like the embargo lifted.