For literalists, it is not that we shall in 20 years all speak Spanish. (Though that’s not a bad idea). Instead, those to whom we will have to speak, will be Spanish-speakers; and as every dealmaker knows, when cutting deals, you speak the language of the dominant deal-party. Moreover, against this backdrop of the return and rise of the Colombian Caribbean, there is, unfortunately, a story of missed opportunities in most of the English-speaking regional nations. For nearly 50 years, since the Cuban Revolution, the Spanish Caribbean was mired in corruption, myopia and decline; their peoples lorded over by varieties of ‘strongman’ leaders. This whilst in the English-speaking Caribbean, we supposedly cultivated democracies, with transparent governments and economic freedoms. We did not succeed in this. We failed in maximizing our opportunities; meaning that in almost every economic sector the return and rise of the Colombian Caribbean will inure comparatively to a decline in the English-speaking Caribbean; meaning further that they have neither want or need of our political or economic tutelage.

The Caribbean Colombian Triangle (CCT) is comprised of Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic, superaided by Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica; extending to South and Central American countries, with emphasis on Brazil. Added to these groupings is the most important economic class in the Spanish Caribbean, as yet unmentioned: The Hispanic Diaspora in the United States; whose remittances to and advocacy for their home country has no comparative reference in the English-speaking Caribbean.

The CCT Diaspora transferred nearly $3.8 billion in remittances to their home countries in 2006-07. (Combined FDI is more than USD$6 billion). Moreover, The Cuban economic and political success in Florida or Dominicans in New York or Panamanians on the Eastern Seaboard anchors this reflexive commercial-cultural relationship. What is more significant is CCT’s (and Latin America’s) growing power and presence in American politics (and in the case of the Dominican Republic in professional sport), and their influence extended to their home countries in the Caribbean. What this will mean, inevitably, is an American government more amenable to CCT initiatives just at the moment of Latin American resurgence. (This will obtain, even in the current ‘08 election cycle, since Latinos figure prominently as independents in the US electorate).

Each of the countries in the CCT will dominate in a regional trade or service area that an English-speaking Caribbean country had an opportunity to dominate. Panama’s $5.5 billion canal expansion will force a correction in the American approach to transshipment, distribution and trade; already causing an additional $50 billion in investment in American port infrastructure. In 2004, STARCapital and I worked with Madam Wu’s office (The Vice Premier of China) to bring such a facility to Freeport in the Bahamas. Nothing! Second, the arrival of Johns Hopkins Medical School (8 years running as the finest medical school in the world) in Panama will mean Panama will have the most advanced medical facility in the Caribbean Basin (a strategy I and others have advocated to Caribbean governments for nearly 10 years now to diversify their tourism product). Third, Cuba will dominate in tourism, biotechnology and telecommunications platforms. Its mobile telephone market will be as large as the total population of the English-speaking Caribbean. Sadly, national telephone companies in at least 3 Caribbean nations had an opportunity to be the dominant players in these markets. Instead, DIGICEL showed the vision and got the prize and now the Egyptian Telephone Company – ORASCOM Telecom SAE - is negotiating to entre a partnership with the Cuban government for advanced telecommunications. Fourth, the Dominican Republic (DR) is spending $600 million dollars to establish “The Financial Centre’s of the Americas”. Unlike the financial centres in the Caribbean (excepting Bermuda), this will be a fully planned financial centre, with domestic as well as regional and international importance. I have been at pains to stress to Caribbean governments how their financial centres are terminally prophylactic and divorced from their domestic financial service markets. The main design elements of our financial centres were forced on us from the outside by the OECD, FATF and IRS. Nothing in the way of product design is identified with Caribbean financial centres. As a consequence, no financial centre in the Caribbean is designed both to meet the demands of the emerging client base, fully regulated but protective of client confidentiality for non-tax purposes. In the DR, the Financial Centre of the Americas will link trade, finance, investment and tax planning with capital market activities (a design I have long recommended over mere tax arbitrage), thereby developing and maintaining a robust local or domestic connection, in the manner of London, Frankfurt, New York or Singapore. The Dominican Republic will also dominate in tourism. With 35 PGA level golf courses, more than 60 Economic Zones and miles of untouched beachfront, the DR has everything smaller Caribbean island nations have, and what they do not, geo-physically, in mountains, rivers and lush valleys, comparatively in expertise and competitively in price.

The area of the most astounding growth in the Spanish Caribbean has been in tourism. The CCT have managed to outpace the rest of the Caribbean combined in stopover visitors in 2007, with nearly 7 million stopovers, easily projecting more than 25 million combined in the next 10 years. Cuba alone grew nearly 700% between 1995 and 2007, going from just about 300,000 to over 2 million. (Remember also that everything Cuba is doing is under an embargo, and so should be projected upwards).

The rest of the world, convinced of the growth potential in the Caribbean Colombian Triangle (CCT) has voted through investment. In Cuba’s case, Canadian firms and organizations such as the Cuba Growth Fund raised more than $1 billion for inward investment. The Cuban-American National Foundation and a host of European firms have raised nearly half a billion more, awaiting an opportunity to invest.

As Cuba’s investor promotions portfolio shows, “Spain's Sol Melia SA manages nine hotels in Cuba. Italy's Telecom Italia SpA owns 29 percent of the Cuban national phone company, Etecsa. And CaribGold Resources Inc., a Canadian firm that explores for precious stones and metals, is prospecting for gold in a joint venture with GeoMinera SA, a company controlled by the Cuban government”.
Cuba will also see export-led growth in a larger variety of areas than most English Caribbean nations, in commodities such as sugar, petroleum, tobacco, construction, nickel, steel, cement, machinery and pharmaceuticals. Additionally, Cuba has four oil refineries with a total production capacity of 301,000 barrels per day. For the moment, as Businessweek reports, “Cuba produces as much as 52,000 barrels of crude a day — 36% of its needs. It comes from onshore and shallow-water wells operated for the past 15 years by Canadian companies Sherritt International and Peberco, as well as Cupet, the Cuban oil monopoly. And that “represents just a fraction of Cuba's onshore potential”, says Rafael Tenreyro-PÈrez, Cupet's exploration director. Farther offshore, in a triangular section of the Gulf of Mexico that belongs to Cuba, things look even better. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that as much as 9.3 billion barrels of oil may lie in the 6,000-foot-deep water.” What this means is Cuba is poised for stupendous growth. Whilst the CARICOM Caribbean receives the lash from the US as drug dealers and mendicants, Cuba will become, inevitably, an economic beacon so powerful that American commercial interest will outpace staid political sentiment; largely because American business will see Cuba as the Dubai of the Caribbean, where you can get a return of $1,000 for every $100 invested. No English Caribbean country has, or is cultivating that sort of investor momentum.

Panama can be considered an unfortunate nation no more. Johns Hopkins has entered into a strategic partnership with the new Hospital Punta Pacifica in Paitilla, Panama. Currently under construction, the developers alone have invested more than $32 million dollars in the facility. Basically, The School will anchor a “medical city”, as the economics of “clusters” unfold, driving regional medical research and professionals under the umbrella of “J-Hop” as the school is known. This is what I meant, in part, when I wrote recently that the CARICOM Caribbean missed a great many opportunities, during the Bush administration; which proved hostile to areas of advanced medical research such as Stem Cells. Now, there is a diminished probability of getting the best universities into the Caribbean, (Dubai and Thailand have the advantage). Schools will look at one’s infrastructure, crime, accessibility and the degree of control they can have over the migration of professionals and the movement in and out of patients; to name a few variables we have trouble with in the English Caribbean.

In the shipping sector, today, only four U.S. ports can handle PPX ships—Seattle, Tacoma, Los Angeles-Long Beach, and Norfolk. East Coast and Gulf ports are preparing to change that.

“We all hope to deepen channels and construct facilities, to handle increased cargo”, noted Richard Wainio, port director and CEO, Tampa Port Authority. At the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, expansion is underway. Half of its cargo, by value, comes from Asia already through Panama. To accommodate PPX ships, dredging is underway to deepen the harbor to 50 feet by 2014, according to spokesman Steve Coleman. (That project is designated a national priority by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with a fiscal 2008 budget of $91 million.) Cargo levels are projected to increase about 7 percent per year, and to double in 10 years from 5 million TEUs per year today,” Coleman says. The port authority is also in the midst of a $600 million project to add intermodal rail access to all terminals. In 2006, it added the capacity for 350 additional lifts and expects to handle 1.3 million by 2011.

According to the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Report, “Panama suffers from weak property rights, lack of labor freedom and corruption. The judicial system is backlogged, not committed to contract enforcement, and subject to political interference. There is significant corruption in the judiciary and civil service.” This will have to change and the arrival of global institutions in Panama will stoke that change from within.

The Dominican Republic is the hidden economic jewel of the Caribbean, and will be the early star of the CCT. We can riddle off statistics: The DR exports Ferronickel, sugar, gold, silver, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and meats. Its exports alone are  $6.881 billion; larger than the entire Bahamian economy. The DR is the number one services exporter in the Caribbean. Also, the DR is more competitive than the US and by far the most competitive exporter of Miscellaneous Manufactures and clothing and textiles in the Americas. In Tourism for the period of 2007, DR had stopovers of 3,979,582.
What is also true is that the DR has a largely young population. Of 9.5 million people 32% are under the age of 14 and trending younger. That means that the DR – where only about 10% of the school population graduates – has a growth potential for decades to come. And the advance of its America’s leading services exports has room to detonate.

Two areas where DR shows clear advantages are Tourism and Financial Services. Certain – often ignored - characteristics of Tourism should be examined here. Service industries do best in places where there is either a high degree of professionalism such as in Switzerland, Singapore or Denmark, or where there is social stratification, such as in Thailand, India and DR. In other places, such as New York, London and Paris, immigrant workers man the services industry. In most of the Caribbean, we have a closed border strategy, a services structure similar to India, Thailand and DR, but with labour demanding a pay scale similar to Switzerland, Singapore and Denmark. In the DR by contrast, all the elements for a growth market are aligned. Even if the GDP per capita increased 100%, wage costs would remain competitive for experienced hospitality workers, in proximity to the largest market in the region and largest in the world in cash terms. Added to that Leonel Fernandez - President of the Dominican Republic - who proved himself the most able leader in the Caribbean, who twice returned his country to financial stability - has won another presidential term.
In financial services, the DR will be the repository of private capital flows from other booming South and Central American emerging markets. Services trades from almost every Spanish country lining the Caribbean Basin terminate in the DR already. An alignment of their capital markets; which is what the DR’s Financial Centres of The Americas anticipates – means DR will have the base liquidity which all capital markets in the English Caribbean lack.

On a ‘quaint’ point, it should be noted that of the 77 million “boomers” retiring in the next 10 years in America, 11% of them (Latin Boomers) are Hispanic. There are also 371,000 High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) in Latin America, worth $5 trillion dollars. If the DR develops its financial centre with the local, regional and international balance which its visionary developer Gaetan Bucher anticipates, it will draw global funds and Banks to the DR, on a legal platform that is immune to the “gold-post” moving strategy of the OCED members. It would be distinctive from the Bahamas in that it would have a specific focus driven locally, (aided from abroad by “Latin Boomers”) rather than from a home office; it would differ from Cayman because it would not rest on tax arbitrage, nor would its activities be totally external to the local economy; it would differ from Bermuda (the regional heavyweight) for the same non-local issues the Bahamas faces and it would have a larger institutional base than BVI (which is the best organized financial centre in our region).

Finally, a few points for reflection: First, all countries in the CCT suffer from or have the advantage – depending on your vantage point - of a ‘fecundity of lack’. Their populations have had to be ingenious owing to severe economic hardship. Such a drive toward ingenuity is a rare attribute and is critical to an “innovation society”; for which Cuba is already infamous and the rest of CCT nations are becoming. Second, CCT and Latin American nations have decoupled from the US economy. Their stock markets are up an average 26% compared to G-7 markets; suggesting they can grow now even if America falters. And since the rest of the world is growing as well, new export non-American partners are emerging for CCT. Third, In the US presidential elections, there is an assumption that CCT nations (Cuba, particularly) are waiting around for US attention. For the better informed, we know that Chavez has gained a significant foothold in Cuba and in trade terms, Mexico has become a dominant player; whilst American rhetoric reflects a 20th century assumption that one nation has all the cards. Fourth, CCT nations have the advantage of an “ideological shift”. When I worked in “Think Tanks” in Europe and America they were festooned with ‘Free Market’ economists from Latin America. Those economists forged an ideological transformation in CCT (across Latin America) unlike their English-speaking counterparts; whose “patronage socialism” is the worst form of socialism because it never matures. This has left the English speaking Caribbean unable to make a clean break towards capitalism like Estonia or Poland or like the DR or Panama. Those economists are now in institutions and government. And whilst, the CCT nations will have a good deal of work to do weeding out corruption, the English Caribbean is suffering heavily (particularly Jamaica, Bahamas, Trinidad, Guyana and even Bermuda), from incendiary criminal activity unseen in CCT. Fifth, and as a point of geo-historical trivia, in most of the large Latin America nations, society and commerce were established by Spanish royal elites. And whilst actual Latin American-Spanish relationships are mercurial (owing to the brutality of Spanish colonialism), Spanish embassies in countries from the DR to Argentina are ringed with visa lines. In my view, along with the rise of the CCT, and the political emergence of Hispanics in America, Spain will be the only resurgent nation in Europe. It is the only European nation that seems to be exploiting the value advantage of the euro through acquisitions in practical terms. On a grander scale, it has already a great King, Juan Carlos, who along with his charming wife Queen Sofia have a fine Prince, Felipe Juan Pablo Alfonso de Todos los Santos de BorbÛn y de Grecia. An act that would solidify the return of Spanish hegemony (albeit, cultural and partly economic, largely symbolic) would be a visit to CCT and Latin America in general by the Crown Prince and Princess Letizia. Again, in the English-speaking Caribbean, we have no comparative economic momentum, nor have we the possibility of anything quite as magical of the royal visit aforementioned.

The final point foregoing may appear a small matter. But we must not underestimate the power of such events to lend galvanizing force to that which is already in motion. Last, of the nations in CCT, as I implied above, they all forecast better than the English-speaking Caribbean. However, the dominant force will be Cuba with its complexity and outsized potential. In fact, whatever one thinks or believes about Fidel Castro (or Raul), Cuba has a distinction over other Hispanic Caribbean, South and Central American countries. When visiting one sees no menacing youth in the streets, no street children begging or engaged in petty street commerce and no malnourishment. There is stellar academic achievement more akin to Barbados than a country at the low end of development. I am offering neither advocacy or rejection of the Revolution (though I find more justice in it than what Batista offered). What I am saying is Raul Castro, Fernandez of DR and Torrijos Espino of Panama must somehow maintain that dignity of the person in their own cultural terms, whilst exploiting the opportunities aforementioned. The CCT will have a unique opportunity to develop a capitalist, market based platform in an utterly new way through which the Spanish will be returned to Caribbean dominance.

Dr. Gilbert NMO Morris is an economist & legal scholar who taught at several American universities. He founded The Landfall Centre for Finance-Trade & International Affairs, which gained international prominence advising financial centres during the OECD blacklisting. He is Chairman of CAICOS Brothers LP & MDB International and Publisher of the Turks & Caicos Free Press.