[LINK] "A Russian-Cuban Entrepreneur Is New Face of Florida"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky looks at a Russian-Cuban entrepreneur making his fortune in Florida. May Cuba be as lucky as Zakharov.

At a rally on Wednesday in Hialeah, Florida, which has the biggest share of Cubans of any U.S. city, Senator Marco Rubio told his audience that they embodied the American dream. "As I walk the streets here, it's small business after small business," he said with a fellow Cuban's pride.

One of these 44,000 businesses in Hialeah -- 80 percent of them Hispanic-owned -- belongs to Fabian Zakharov. It also provides evidence that Rubio's view of his community and its relationship with Cuba is increasingly out of touch.

Zakharov Auto Parts sells the rarest of commodities in the U.S.: components for Soviet-built Lada cars. In the Miami area, where Ferraris outnumber Ladas, nobody except perhaps Zakharov himself, who owns several of the Russian clunkers, needs the parts. But the store, its owner says, does $1 million worth of business per year, and Zakharov keeps expanding his retail space.

His customers are mostly locals, but the parts ultimately go to Cuba, where, he says, up to 50,000 Russian cars still roam the potholed roads. Besides, much of Cuba's signature fleet of U.S. vehicles from the 1950s is equipped with Lada engines and other parts: That's how the stately sedans survived the Communist era. Zakharov has no competition: Since he founded the business in 2011, he has obtained deep discounts from suppliers in Russia and brought delivery times down to three days or less, a steep entry barrier to anyone who doesn't speak Russian and doesn't know the ropes.

Zakharov was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and a Cuban father, not an infrequent intermarriage thanks to active student and professional exchanges between the Soviet Union and Cuba. The family moved to the island, where Zakharov grew up and trained as an electrical engineer. But he dreamed of making a fortune, an impossibility under Fidel Castro, so he went back to President Vladimir Putin's Russia in the early 2000s, when that country still looked like a land of opportunity. It didn't work out as he planned.