At the lavish home of one of Miami’s top plastic surgeons, overlooking the Biscayne Bay, some of the wealthiest Cuban-American families in Florida have gathered. They are there to thrash out their vision of Cuba’s future at the fourth meeting of the newly created Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce (CANCC). Rum in hand and Rolexes on wrists, this is Miami’s old money. People with well-recognised Cuban-American surnames – like Bacardi and Babun – chat around the pool about the lamentable state of the island’s economy, and share titbits of gossip about the latest political rumblings.
“The intention of this evening is to gather under one roof the most prominent Cuban-American entrepreneurs in Miami-Dade County,” says CANCC president Juan Omar Sixto, “and the objective is to be in Cuba once the regime falls”. His guests are convinced that moment is nigh. Millions without power as Cuba hit by latest major blackout US sanctions more Cuban companies and officials How the US oil blockade is pushing Cuba into darkness This influential community of Cuban exiles has detested the Communist-run government ever since the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro expropriated their lands and nationalised their families’ companies after taking power in 1959. And they have wielded their political and economic clout in Florida over the years to shape Washington’s policies towards their homeland.
Sixto fled the island as a teenager. Now a real estate developer in his early 80s, his organisation is drafting plans for what he calls “the day after” in Cuba. The CANCC has created a proposal for a Cuban Stock Exchange and formed committees on everything from energy infrastructure to food security. 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. The difference now, insists Sixto, is the Trump administration’s push to force total change on the island. And he says they have the ear of 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,” says Sixto.
In Cuba itself, such claims are mostly met with scepticism. In the face of Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Cuba, the island’s leadership recently announced 176 economic liberalisation measures. The Cuban President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said they were “to advance the defence of socialism, to support and widen social justice”. To his critics, they 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.
Still, the attendees at the CANCC meeting 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? “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,” says Mike Bustamante, associate professor of history at the University of Miami. With the November mid-term elections in the US approaching and the Trump administration embroiled in the “quagmire” of the Iran war, Bustamante argues 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.” With the island’s oil supply effectively shut off since January, that is already a significant escalation, says Mike Bustamente.
Although they have made life unbearable for most ordinary people, they haven’t yet “created the ingredients for a political inflection point” in Cuba, he adds. The Cuban government has not commented on the CANCC itself. But traditionally such groups prompt indignation among revolutionaries who insist they will not be forced out by their critics in Miami. I ask some guests if they can 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.
For Cuban-American agricultural expert Hugo Orizondo 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,” he admits. “But we do know the potential [for investment].” Orizondo says he understands the reticence among Cubans to see foreign investors buying up something as sensitive as the rights to arable land. “But what are they going to do with it?” he retorts.
“When investors come, they bring money and technology into the land.” Both are urgently needed, he says, if Cuba is ever to produce enough to feed its own population and break its reliance on food imports. Land titles lie at the heart of any reconstruction project put forward by this generation of wealthy Cuban Americans. Juan Omar Sixto says his father lost five properties and a farm in Cuba’s Pinar del Rio province to the revolution. While he insists he has no intention of removing any family living in those homes, he does want compensation for the nationalised 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.” “It’s moral justice,” he argues. 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.
Both slavery and the system of indentured workers didn’t end in Cuba 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. “Most of our sugar mills have been dismantled, but we will recover those lands and put them into production,” says Nicolás Gutiérrez, the president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba, an exile organisation championing the title claims. “I’m not promising it will be in sugar,” he says.
“It might be in ethanol, co-generation, solar panels or water purification cells. Who knows? There are a lot of different options,” he remarks. “We need to get them producing, we need to have a real wage paid to Cuban workers and create a multiplier economic effect across the island.” With the ice clinking in their drinks and a cool breeze rustling the palm trees on the perfectly manicured lawn, the CANCC members make it sound easy.
But within hours of their gathering, Cuba had descended into its sixth nationwide blackout this year. The disconnection between the hopes for change in Miami and the realities on the ground in Cuba is stark. Many Miami-based Cubans think the monumental shift they have prayed for is almost here. If so, it will inevitably bring huge social and humanitarian disruption which the stricken island is ill-equipped to cope with.
Even assuming the diaspora’s support is well-intentioned rather than purely self-interested, fixing the island’s failing electrical grid alone is estimated to cost $8bn to $10bn (£6bn to £7.5bn). Before any industry in Cuba – from agriculture to tourism – can be revitalised by the exiles’ wealth and political connections, Cubans continue to face acute shortages in food, water, fuel and medicines. Miami’s ambitious plans aside, most Cubans just hope their days get a little easier sometime soon.
