{"id":1593,"date":"2017-05-23T22:59:18","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T03:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/?p=1593"},"modified":"2025-03-01T11:01:21","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T17:01:21","slug":"old-man-and-the-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/2017\/05\/23\/old-man-and-the-see\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Man and the See"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway wrote that here, and I\u2019ll get to him at the end)<\/p>\n

I mentioned yesterday that the other number that struck me as being important was 11000000. That\u2019s the population of Cuba.\u00a0 As much as the comparisons circle in my mind comparing my first visit to China (1990) or the early 1990s with my first visit to Cuba a quarter of a century later, the comparisons turn increasingly into contrasts.\u00a0 Despite the presence of two currencies and a centralized economy,based on central planning, there was no Tiananmen Square here, no obvious police or party state, and a gemutlichkeit that is not necessarily attributable to tourists (although, as I mentioned, the tourist invasion is here).<\/p>\n

The businesses and academics we visited with yesterday and today have broadly outlined the challenges (sometimes with sugar coating), and their potential response.\u00a0 Perhaps the biggest is the difference between a country of 1.2 billion (China) and a country of 11 million, about 20% of whom are over the age of 50.\u00a0 For a variety of reasons, including emigration, the birth rate is down, and the bootstrapping of a young labor force that propelled the economic development of China, is not going to happen in Cuba.\u00a0 The emphasis, we were told, that the government would love to insure, is on the development of\u00a0 a knowledge-based society.\u00a0 While the Cubans are literate (98%+ according to some of our sources), the goal is seemingly that of every developed and developing country<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is the scarcity of capital.\u00a0 Indeed, one of the traits I realized in reading Jack Ma\u2019s biography, and the book on Airbnb and Uber (the \u201cUpstarts\u201d) is the relative ease with which those startups were able to raise \u201cangel funds.\u201d\u00a0 (Goldman Sachs gave Ma $30 million for Alibaba). That is not the case in Cuba, where the US embargo hurts.\u00a0 In addition, I raised the question of the overseas Chinese, overseas Vietnamese, and overseas Indians, all of whom have been critical in assisting those nations in moving up in development.\u00a0 Three million Cubans live elsewhere (including 2 million in the United States), and many of them are wealthy; the answer, the professors gave me, was that giving them privileges would be \u201cdealing with traitors\u201d and negating the sacrifices\u00a0 made for the revolution.\u00a0 Mulling over the answer, I think about what happened in China, where the bitterness of the Kuomintang defeat (or the Communist victory) lasted until the death of Mao and Chiang, and required the move of Deng Xiao-ping to give special economic zones to Xiamen (across from Taiwan) or to Singapore Chinese in Suzhou, etc.\u00a0 Locals have, however, told us how much change has occurred in the last five years here, which they attribute to Obama.<\/p>\n

Today was a combination of history and business, and the two are related.\u00a0 Cuba, again, the professors insisted, had been too reliant on a single market.\u00a0 Spain, as part of Spanish colonial policy, that tried to funnel all the wealth of the colonies through the mother country\u2014Seville was the first major source of finished Cuban tobacco; then the United States, partly by proximity, and partly through dollar diplomacy, and the protectorate that lasted more or less through 1959, and finally the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

What does Cuba have to share with the world?<\/p>\n

We have had a chance to look at three of the major income generators in Cuba\u2014tourism, and the agricultural products, tobacco and rum\u2014the major cash crops of Cuba today.<\/p>\n

We went to the Melia hotel for a talk with two of the executives.\u00a0 The pattern there is what we saw in the other businesses as well; a foreign (not US) company brought in for its expertise (in this case management) to run hotels owned and built by one of three major government agencies.\u00a0 The spike in tourism, especially from Americans, has had some interesting consequences.\u00a0 The lack of adequate housing led to a classic supply and demand situation, when hotels raised their prices. Tour operators, in turn, had to raise their prices by between 500 and 1000 dollars, which led to cancellations.\u00a0 That was one consequence.\u00a0 Another was the approval to build more hotels including a new one in the old town that will decrease the Nacional to the 4th<\/sup> most expensive.\u00a0 And a third (semi encouraged by the government) was the arrival of the shared economy: i.e., airbnb, an arrival greeted with hostility by our presenters.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a fourth response, as I think I mentioned last night\u2014and that\u2019s the return of the cruise ships to Cuban waters.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Hemingway’s favorite hotel\/bar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Interestingly, at the Havana Club museum (how to make rum), they mentioned the great growth in tourism and rum during Prohibition.\u00a0 One of the Club Ron (as it was known in those days) advertisements noted, \u201cJust a Hop from Miami,\u201d and I can only imagine the decadence of the period from \"\"<\/a> the buildings we saw on our tour of the old city. \u00a0We stopped at the end of the day for refreshments and music at a bar Hemingway used to frequent.\u00a0 His daily diet was either 12 mojitos (the local drink offered to guests and served at meals) or 8 daiquiri.\u00a0 None of us followed his example, I\u2019m happy to say.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll visit a tobacco field tomorrow, so I\u2019ll save what I have to say after that trip.\u00a0 I still want to get back to the old city later this week; you know I love forts and churches, and Cuba, as one of the rich colonies in the Spanish empire, needed to have both.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway wrote that here, and I\u2019ll get to him at the end) I mentioned yesterday that the other number that struck me as being important was 11000000. That\u2019s the population of Cuba.\u00a0 As much as the comparisons circle in my mind comparing my first visit to China (1990) or … Continue reading “Old Man and the See”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cuba-2017"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1593"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7192,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1593\/revisions\/7192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}