fold.
Cuba is nowhere near ready for an influx of US tourism — and will not be anytime soon. Compared with a decade ago, there are more paladares — privately-owned restaurants that cater to foreigners.
A number of them, such as El Cocinero and Rio Mar, would be elegant standouts in any city on earth. But the infrastructure for major tourism is lacking. Perhaps, in time, Cuba may experiment with out-of-town beachfront hotels, but no one is talking about them with any specificity quite yet. For now, the downtown hotels remain few and many visitors stay in rented rooms — charming yet inadequate for scaled tourism.
As for investments, even if the US embargo were to be withdrawn by Congress, American investors would have to navigate the arcane, opaque politics of the Cuban government to obtain necessary licences and permissions.
To survive for more than half a century, the Cuban system evolved a complex political ecosystem that is exceedingly difficult for outsiders to negotiate. Those who administer it have not manifested the will or desire to give up their influence. Rationally, one would expect Cuban leaders to seek profitable opportunities for their people and perhaps themselves. But this would entail the risk of giving up influence — and the Cuban leadership certainly knows it.
All this may sound gloomy — and it is certainly no fun to be pessimistic about such a unique country.
But the story is not all depressing. In fact, gradualism, rather than revolution, may be exactly what Cuba needs.
Of course human rights abuses should be reversed and free expression expanded. That is why the freeing of political prisoners is a positive step, but when it comes to Cuba’s economic development, slow progress is preferable to radical transformation.
The same is true of political evolution: Moving too fast may not produce greater freedom, but actually the opposite.
Consider the structural economic problems that have plagued other Caribbean nations. Agricultural exports can be an important economic driver, but too great a dependence renders an economy subservient to fluctuating commodity prices — and can stand in the way of value-added exports. Tourism can bring foreign capital and improve trade balances.
But the jobs it generates are mostly menial. It can also drive neo-imperial or neocolonial attitudes on the part of richer countries as local populations come to be seen primarily in terms of their ability to serve.
What is more, tourism is highly dependent on economic forces outside a nation’s own control. Going slow may enable Cuba to target its tourism industry at higher value, cultural tourism rather than beachfront holiday packages — which would probably be much better for Cuba in the long run.
One positive effect of the socialist revolution has been Cuba’s investment in human capital. Its education system is better than that of comparable countries and it boasts that it is a net exporter of physicians and nurses.
It may not be realistic for Cuba to generate millions of high-paying jobs quickly, but selective foreign investors could identify and take advantage of the skilled parts of Cuba’s workforce — and thereby generate better jobs than are characteristic of most island economies.
In politics, Russia serves to remind us that rapid change can produce radical instability and lead back to a barely updated version of the old regime.
If the Cuban government were to announce free and fair elections tomorrow, there would be no political infrastructure to accommodate the development — and political disaster could well follow. Democracy remains as important a desideratum as ever.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it is still the worst form of government, except for all the others. But getting to democracy is a process, not an event. Cuba may well get there eventually, but by taking its time, it may be able to avoid some of the flaws that democracy is known to bring — and to make the best of Cuba’s socialist legacy.