I have always thought of Cuba as the Germany of Latin America. I have felt they would take off when Castro dies.

The Bourdain show, No Reservations, was from Cuba this week and I was stunned at the overall shabbiness of Cuba in general. Much of what you wrote was conveyed in the show.

On a somewhat lighter note, they could make a big dent in their economic woes by auctioning off their automobiles. The number of 60+ year old USA cars on their streets is astounding.

First, the gang that is currently running things there will be run out of Dodge for good. That’s a good thing. The political Revolucionarios are gangsters, thugs, a more corrupt and crooked crew is hard to imagine. But you might wind up with a bloodbath, too. A lot of old scores will be settled and it won’t be pretty. And as always in Thermidor, the innocent suffer along with the guilty. Many Party members are just technocrats and professionals, you don’t have a career without Party ties, and Cuba will need them. If they survive. Those that do will leave. The one thing Cuba has done is educate an enormous number of its citizens. The good ones will leave the island, the bad ones will become the new power elite.

For those that are left, you will have a population that has been kept afloat by Party handouts and phony jobs and welfare for fifty years. These people have forgotten how to work, how to take care of themselves, how to govern themselves, they’ve lost all ambition and initiative. Their motto is “we pretend to work, they pretend to pay”, they are good at hustling and at cheating the system, smuggling and black marketeering. Perfect training for the new Capitalism that will sweep the island. These people have never known anyting but Communism. It will be like Russia in the 90s all over again. Anyone with any ambition or determination either joined the Party, left the country, or died in the Florida Straits.

Then the exilados will come streaming back. Most of them will be geriatric cases drowning in nostalgia and rich as Croesus by local standards. They are going to want their property back. Their children and grandchildren are Americans now, they might come to visit but not to rebuild the country. The younger ones who come back to stay will be the those who couldn’t make it abroad, carpetbaggers, criminals, crooked businessmen, gangsters. They will return to feast on on the remains of a once proud and beautiful country. But they will build nothing. They will come back with phony papers and deeds and take what they want, and they will bribe whatever legal system survives to help them plunder and loot and suck the land dry.

American Aid? Not hardly. America is broke, American companies may go back and try to resume their age-old role of systematically raping Cuba of its resources and cheap labor. But they may find that the Chinese are now comfortably settled into that role and will be in no mood to step aside for the Yanks. China has quietly taken the role of the USSR as Cuba’s sugar-daddy, and they are a lot better at it. And they will be flush with $US for investment. We will just be their markets, and their debtors, not their suppliers.

Criminals from all over Latin America will pour in to fill in the power vacuum and to feast on the bones. It will be like Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, crime and illegal aliens, drugs and AIDS. A lot of drug money will be laundered in Cuba.

Castro has wrecked what 50 years ago was the most prosperous and advanced nation in Latin America, with the exception of Argentina. It’s so sad. Cuba may never recover.

My other cousin, Robert the Red, was there a few years ago, his first time on the island (he was born and raised in the USA). He was there a few weeks and he thought everything was just fine. But he’s an ideologue, a zealot. He sees only what he wants to see. He’s a very intelligent man, but when it comes to politics and economics, he’s a child.