Hare: Cuban Relations Mean Big Business
Paul Webster Hare, Visiting Lecturer in International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said there were challenges and opportunities in the emerging business relationship between the U. S. and Cuba.
Hare made his case in an op-ed on May 11 in the Financial Times entitled “Dangers in Economy Run by Cuba’s Revolutionary in a Business Suit.”
From the text of the op-ed:
So what awaits US companies flying to Cuba? The welcome will be lavish. They will visit revolutionary showpieces such as the Latin American School of Medicine. The mojitos and cigars will taste better. Even the home-run distance at the Havana baseball stadium is marked in feet not metres.
Yet Cuba is still a foreign land for international business. Features of the revolution endure to this day; rudimentary use of the internet is only the most visible. Statistics are produced by the state and there is no independent verification. Foreign exchange reserves are never published. Military-controlled companies retain almost all the hard currency Cuba earns. State employees — estimated at more than 70 per cent of working-age Cubans — receive an average of less than $30 a month in currency worthless anywhere else. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” is a joke almost as old as Havana’s Cadillac Eldorados.
You can read the entire op-ed here.
Ambassador Paul Webster Hare was the British ambassador to Cuba from 2001-04. Learn more about him here.