[ISL] "As Cuba Rises, Puerto Rico Falls"

[rfmcdonald]

There may be a certain amount of trolling in James Gibney's Bloomberg View article--Cuba has to catch up quite a bit of ground with its neighbour in the Hispanic Caribbean. I wonder, though, if he might not be right about Cuba's greater potential for growth.

President Barack Obama dangles U.S. dollars before the Castros while Congress stonewalls Puerto Rico’s pleas for debt restructuring. The Tampa Bay Rays take the field in Havana as San Juan fends off New York hedge funds wielding legal baseball bats. The Rolling Stones play a free concert for Cubans; Puerto Rico can’t get no satisfaction.

As Cuba rises and Puerto Rico falls, it’s worth considering the diverging trajectories of these two ex-Spanish colonies that the Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió described more than 100 years ago as “two wings of the same bird.” Even as the resumption of diplomatic ties with the U.S. opens new possibilities for Cuba, Puerto Rico’s current status as a U.S. commonwealth has turned into an ugly dead end.

Puerto Rico is defaulting in slow motion on $70 billion worth of debt. Its economy has shrunk 9 of the past 10 years. A few hundred miles to the west, meanwhile, economic reforms are creating new livelihoods for self-employed Cubans, whose material conditions are improving. Buoyed by the arrival of new tourists, remittances, and foreign investments, Cuba’s economy grew by 4 percent last year.

And when the U.S. embargo is lifted, Cuba – which for much of the 19th and 20th centuries was the Caribbean’s predominant economy -- is likely to take a growing bite out of Puerto Rico’s fortunes, in tourism, manufacturing and services. And that's before accounting for Puerto Rico's existing fiscal straits, which will lead to shrinking government services, higher costs imposed by utilities under siege from creditors and a string of broken social promises and busted pensions.

True, Cubans don’t have democracy. Then again, at the national level, neither do Puerto Ricans: Despite being U.S. citizens, they can't vote for president or in Congress, which these days mostly ignores them. Cubans may face the threat of arbitrary detention and abuse. But they’re much less likely than Puerto Ricans to be shot dead on the street, or to be victimized by drug traffickers or other criminals.