Wealthy Cuban-Americans in Miami draft business plans for Cuba after current government falls

Sixto says chamber would ‘go and do business in Cuba right away’

The Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce convened its fourth meeting at the Biscayne Bay home of one of Miami’s top plastic surgeons, drawing some of the wealthiest Cuban-American families in Florida, BBC News reported. People with well-recognized Cuban-American surnames — like Bacardi and Babun — chatted around the pool about the lamentable state of the island’s economy and traded gossip about the latest political rumblings, according to the BBC.

CANCC president Juan Omar Sixto, a real estate developer in his early 80s who fled the island as a teenager, framed the work as planning for what he calls “the day after” in Cuba. “The intention of this evening is to gather under one roof the most prominent Cuban-American entrepreneurs in Miami-Dade County,” Sixto said, “and the objective is to be in Cuba once the regime falls.” His guests are convinced that moment is nigh, the BBC reported.

The influential Miami exile community has detested the Communist-run government ever since Fidel Castro expropriated their lands and nationalized their families’ companies after taking power in 1959, the BBC reported. The community has wielded its political and economic clout in Florida over the years to shape Washington’s policies toward their homeland.

Post-Communist planning is nothing new in Miami. Countless documents and logistical plans have been drawn up by interest groups over the decades, some of them more sober and measured than others, according to BBC News. The CANCC has prepared plans for a Cuban Stock Exchange and formed committees on everything from energy infrastructure to food security, the BBC reported.

The difference now, Sixto said, is the Trump administration’s push to force total change on the island. Sixto said the chamber has some high-profile contacts “including people close to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.” “Together with deliveries of humanitarian aid and medical supplies, we’d go and do business in Cuba right away,” Sixto said.

In Cuba itself, such claims are mostly met with skepticism, the BBC reported. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel recently announced 176 economic liberalization measures in the face of Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Cuba, saying the reforms were intended “to advance the defence of socialism, to support and widen social justice.” To his critics, the measures look distinctly like full-blown capitalism — lifting the cap on the number of workers in a private business, allowing the direct hiring and firing of Cuban employees, and permitting ownership of multiple enterprises at once, including by Cuban Americans, the BBC reported.

CANCC attendees dismissed the economic reforms as cosmetic, saying they gave no meaningful guarantees to investors. They would “not put a foot into Cuba,” Sixto said, while the current regime remained in place.

Some analysts think such planning meetings are premature. Although Cuban Americans are convinced that change is imminent in Cuba, none can say with any certainty what it will be — a US military operation as seen in Venezuela in January, or a new economic pact with the island’s leadership, according to BBC News.

Mike Bustamante, an associate professor of history at the University of Miami, said the high expectations of imminent transition have been set back. “Right now, the very high expectations created by the US administration that some kind of ‘day after’ was coming soon, or that Cuba would ‘be next’ have been kicked down the road,” Bustamante said. With the November US midterm elections approaching and the Trump administration embroiled in what Bustamante called the “quagmire” of the Iran war, he said there is little appetite for further foreign adventures. “It’s really tough to think that they will escalate further than what they’re doing which is this drip-drip-drip of sanctions,” Bustamante said. With the island’s oil supply effectively shut off since January, that is already a significant escalation, he added — though the measures have “made life unbearable for most ordinary people” without producing “the ingredients for a political inflection point” in Cuba.

The Cuban government has not commented on the CANCC itself, according to BBC News. But traditionally such groups prompt indignation among revolutionaries who insist they will not be forced out by their critics in Miami.

Hugo Orizondo, a Cuban-American agricultural expert at the gathering, told the BBC that it is only practical to draw up a road map to Cuban development. “Right now, Cuba is like a black hole, we don’t know what is happening over there,” Orizondo said. “But we do know the potential [for investment].” Orizondo acknowledged the reticence among Cubans to see foreign investors buying up the rights to arable land, but said money and technology are urgently needed if Cuba is ever to produce enough to feed its own population and break its reliance on food imports. “But what are they going to do with it?” he said. “When investors come, they bring money and technology into the land.”

Land titles lie at the heart of any reconstruction project put forward by this generation of wealthy Cuban Americans. Sixto said his father lost five properties and a farm in Cuba’s Pinar del Río province to the revolution. While he insisted he has no intention of removing any family living in those homes, he wants compensation for the nationalized land. “I worked on that farm for five years of my life with my father, and they took it away. I want restitution or compensation. Even if they give me just a penny on the dollar, I’ll take it,” Sixto said. He described the demand as “moral justice.”

The Cuban government portrays such historic title claims as bitterness by “a corrupt landed gentry who made fortunes on the backs of indentured workers and slaves,” the BBC reported. Slavery and indentured labor in Cuba did not end until the late 19th century. The government also argues that the exiles could never stand that Castro passed land reforms which handed over their fields to the workers and the state, according to BBC News.

Nicolás Gutiérrez, president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba, an exile organization championing the title claims, said his members intend to recover former sugar lands. “Most of our sugar mills have been dismantled, but we will recover those lands and put them into production,” Gutiérrez said. “I’m not promising it will be in sugar. It might be in ethanol, co-generation, solar panels or water purification cells. Who knows? There are a lot of different options.” The goal, he said, would be “to get them producing, we need to have a real wage paid to Cuban workers and create a multiplier economic effect across the island.”

A BBC correspondent asked guests if they could appreciate the irony that the same people who support a major source of the island’s misery — the decades-long US economic embargo and the current fuel blockade — are now hatching plans for its reconstruction, without the input of most Cubans.

Within hours of the gathering, Cuba had descended into its sixth nationwide blackout of the year, the BBC reported. Any transition the exiles anticipate will inevitably bring huge social and humanitarian disruption which the stricken island is ill-equipped to cope with, according to the BBC. Fixing the island’s failing electrical grid alone is estimated to cost $8 billion to $10 billion (£6 billion to £7.5 billion). Before any industry in Cuba — from agriculture to tourism — can be revitalized by the exiles’ wealth and political connections, Cubans continue to face acute shortages in food, water, fuel and medicines, the BBC reported.