Mentirita is the diminuitive of mentira, the Spanish for “lie”. So mentirita can be fairly translated as “little white lie”.

Mentirita is also Cuban slang for a Cuba Libre (literal translation: Free Cuba) which is a nickname for a ron y Coca-cola (rum and coke) the Cuban national beverage. Go into any bar in Miami and order a “little white lie” in Spanish and they’ll bring you a “free Cuba”. Get it? In Cuba, you can’t find Coca-Cola except in shops that cater to turistas who can pay with foreign currency, because the peso is a worthless piece of paper who’s ability to buy anything disappears at the water’s edge, and Cuba, after all, is an island. Besides, Bacardi is now distilled and bottled in Puerto Rico. If you can follow all that, you shouldn’t have any trouble making sense of what follows.

So what does it mean that relations between Cuba and the USA are being liberalized? The implication (although it will require an act of Congress, Mr Obama can’t use an executive order) is that the US economic blockade of Cuba will soon be lifted. Cuba has the US Chamber of Commerce salivating because of its economic potential, so you can count on a Republican Congress to pass the necessary legislation to lift the blockade. All the bitching and moaning will be for the benefit of the Miami Cubans and the TParty. Wall Street is what’s behind this move, and the Miami Cubans can no longer deliver presidential elections to the GOP. Follow the money.

But what good will that do? Nobody in Cuba has any money, the country is bankrupt and in debt and the currency is worthless. How can they buy any US goods? All Cuba has is natural resources and lots of unemployed people.

Listen carefully, amigos, the US will lend Cuba the money to buy our goods, and US banks will get rich charging exorbitant interest rates to finance Cuban purchases in the US. And you can count on US taxpayers guaranteeing those loans so if the Cubans welsh on their debts, the banks will get their money back. Everybody wins, the Cubans buy US stuff, US banks loan them the money so they can do so, and the taxpayer gets stiffed if anything goes wrong. Something very similar happened when the Soviets cornered the market on US wheat, bought up the whole harvest at a discount (and with US financing), resold it at premium prices and made a killing. The Soviets eventually repaid their loan, so US banks and US agribusiness got rich, the Soviets got rich, and the rest of the world paid top dollar for bread. A few years later they did it again, but this time it was phosphate ore (even though the Soviet Union was a big world producer). Florida is a leader in phosphate mining, (and my mother was a secretary at US Phosphoric Products) so it was big news in my home town, but it didn’t make much of a splash in the national media. It was the cold war, after all. Now you can see why everybody is so hot to build the Keystone Pipeline, even though oil prices are plummeting. The pipeline is a time machine for funneling cash from the future.

Now we aren’t going to be selling the Cubans paint and plaster and 2×4′s for home improvement, or spare parts for their ’57 Chebbies, they have no way to pay for it. But Cuban state-run industries will be buying machine tools, industrial equipment, farm machinery and other items with the cash we loan them. Like all businesses everywhere, they expand with borrowed money, not with their own operating capital. And they will probably repay most of their loans, because the capital improvements they make to their industrial plant will eventually start producing profits, much of which we will share because we are their natural trading partner, just 90 miles away, we can undercut the Euros and the Chinese (who see the writing on the wall and are investing in Cuba big time). Even the Miami Cubans will eventually get with the program because they are very good at business, they speak the language, and their kids all have MBAs from the finest Florida universities. They’ll be the middlemen. The Cuban Communist Party nomenklatura will get rich, and our banks will get rich and some of the trickle-down will no doubt get to the average Cuban working stiff, who will now be free to buy cell phones and laptops and all the other fruits of American free enterprise. American cash will deepen the harbors for cruise ships, American contractors will build airports and hotels, and Cubans will make the beds, pour the drinks, and buss the tables. The time machine will be working again, it will be just like in 1958, except this time it won’t be the Mob cutting the cake.

Cuba will be another economic colony of the US, just like Puerto Rico–except in PR, it wasn’t taxpayer-backed US bank loans that subsidized American business, it was welfare checks from the US government.

We’re going to get a chance to see what capitalism does best, create wealth from nothing, bootstrapping from future profits by borrowing from itself down the line. The promise of tomorrow’s growth is used to create the capacity to build that growth today. Its a little like a Ponzi scheme, and a little like printing your own greenbacks in the basement. Its finance capital at work, and there is nothing quite like it in the world.

Until the bubble bursts.