Typical 1950s pods and chevy are everywhere. Imagine the reaction of a man who earns $20 a month after resuming trade with the United States: “I won’t give you more than $40,000 for your car.”
Cuba’s 1950s hotels still stand, too. More importantly, Cuba’s casinos are the same. Although it’s dark and empty now, nothing else has changed. Even the chandeliers are the same. When you walk around the Riviera casino, you swear you will hear the ghosts of long-gone slot machines and garbage tables whisper.
Many bars and nightclubs are still open. The biggest of them all, Tropicana with multi-level outdoor stages, sells out every night. The celebration features feathery headdresses and figurative showgirls who perform sexy dances, or something that might have been considered sexy at least in 1959.
As soon as Fidel came to power through his hand-picked interim president, Manuel Urutia, he shut down the casino, as if he had canceled the national lottery. However, thousands of Cubans who were forced out of their jobs took to the streets to protest. Castro’s economic advisers told him that if the casinos didn’t reopen, the country’s economy would collapse.
They were proved right, but it was too late. Castro emptied his mind for a while. But tourists, especially Americans, didn’t approach in droves. Casinos were shut down for good, and the economy really collapsed. 슬롯머신
Communist countries don’t oppose legal gambling. Casinos, in particular, were seen as a means of earning foreign currency from tourists and the underground economy. I did all the transactions in casinos in Hungary with Deutsche Bank.
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam still has casinos. Surprisingly, so does North Korea.
And of course there’s Macao. The casinos there make more money than all the privately owned casinos in Nevada, New Jersey, Mississippi, and the rest of the United States combined.
Macau, like Hong Kong, is a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. Although it would be more accurate to describe it as Marxism, China is still technically a communist country. It is a broad free enterprise capitalism that thrives under totalitarianism, a one-party dictatorship.
Officials running Cuba can find a partial solution to the economic catastrophe and political crisis Cuba is currently experiencing, looking east – east. Cuba should open Macau.
Resort casinos create jobs and create much-needed income. These casinos could ease Cuba’s transition out of the economic downturn created by pure communism, as they did in China.
Cuba, of course, is home to hundreds of millions of middle-class residents who have few other legal means of gambling.
However, Cuba is already attracting many tourists from Europe and Latin America; tourism is the country’s leading industry. The glaring success of Havana casinos in the 1950s illustrates what legal gaming can do, especially when Americans can visit without restrictions.
The biggest problem is political. The casino in Havana has been a symbol of the corrupt regime of former dictator Fulgencio Batista. When asked about the Americans who ran gambling in Cuba, Fidel said, “We want to not only expel those gangs, but shoot them.”
In the early 1960s, children were able to get cartoon trade cards by purchasing Felice [Happy in Spanish] Prutas canned fruit. They stuck them on “Album de la Revolution Cubana.” One photo shows an angry mob storming Deauville casinos by branding them “El peblo destroxza algunos casis y cas de juego,” “People destroy some casinos and gambling houses.”
Still, it was half a century ago. Times change. Fifty years before Macau became the world’s best casino market, gambling in China was put to death.
Cuba already has tourist areas that locals, except for work, cannot enter. Canadian tourists already fly directly to resorts on Cuba’s southern coast to reach the beaches. The natural location of the first Cuban casino resort is ironically the Bay of Pigs. The site of the disastrous and failed invasion of 1961 is the now thriving resort, especially for Europeans.
But there is another place, where the casino has the potential to be a more positive political statement by the Cuban government. It is isolated from the majority of the population, more than 500 miles from Havana and is actually closer to Miami. If the U.S. allows free navigation, there are beaches and airports, and one of the largest ports in the world for cruise ships.
Cuba can establish another tourist area on the Cuban side of Guantánamo Bay, where legal gambling is possible. Local residents will be banned. However, visitors from all other countries, including the U.S., will be welcome.
Americans can travel to Macau without needing a visa. Wouldn’t it be great if Guantanamo Bay became more famous for its hotel casino resorts than prisons?