For more than six decades, Cuba has seen millions of its citizens emigrate. They have not only left in search of better incomes, but also in search of opportunities for personal and professional fulfillment that were impossible on the island. Engineers, doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, and athletes had to develop their careers in free societies, where innovation, individual initiative, and free enterprise were not crimes or suspicions, but rather engines of progress.
The result has been a massive brain drain that impoverishes the nation while enriching the host countries. While creativity and entrepreneurship are repressed within Cuba, in exile these same Cubans flourish, creating businesses, leading institutions, and innovating in science and culture. It wasn’t a “brain drain”; it was a criminal “waste of talent,” eradicating the freedoms that would have allowed them to flourish in the country of their birth.
BEYOND MONEY: KNOWLEDGE REMITTANCES
For years, remittances have been discussed as the financial aid that emigrants send to their families on the island. In my essay From Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Knowledge Remittances (Miami Dade College, 2013), I proposed broadening the perspective. In addition to financial capital, there is human capital (knowledge and skills) and social capital (human relationships with people and institutions whose potential support can facilitate the successful realization of personal projects). We should not only be concerned with the financial remittances that a citizen can send from abroad to their country of origin. In the digital information age, it is also possible to send knowledge remittances. that include part of the human and social capital accumulated by that person.
Knowledge transfers are not measured in dollars or euros, but in the knowledge, experiences, values, and social networks that emigrants accumulate throughout their lives. These transfers include modern management practices learned in large corporations; medical and scientific methods developed in prestigious hospitals and universities; civic values born of living in democratic societies; and the vision of the future acquired when one discovers a world of opportunity. These are intangible but powerful resources, capable of transforming a nation. If money helps one survive upon arriving in another country, knowledge and human relationships help one be reborn.
A FREE CUBA: FEASIBLE FUTURE
The series Cuban Talents in Freedom by Cuba Siglo 21 aims to show precisely that: the stories of men and women who, once freed, demonstrated how far they could go. Surgeons who revolutionized medicine, entrepreneurs who founded restaurant chains, artists who shine on international stages, athletes who conquered podiums. They are living examples of what Cuba lost by denying them the space to develop, but also of what Cuba can gain when it regains economic freedom and democracy.
At the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami there is a section dedicated to some of the most prominent Cubans in exile.
When that moment arrives, it won’t just be a matter of receiving financial capital from abroad. Cuba will be able to count on its most valuable human capital: the knowledge, experience, and civic training, as well as the social networks built by its children, now scattered around the world. On that day, remittances of knowledge will be as important as those of money, and will be the foundation for rebuilding a country devastated by decades of authoritarianism.
To this day, not only this potential human capital is wasted, but also the financial resources transferred through remittances, since the lack of freedoms in Cuba prevents their capitalization within a framework of legal security. Financial remittances are therefore condemned to be used for the recipients’ consumption, but not for investment and the undertaking of personal prosperity projects. Only those close to those in power receive this opportunity. Most of the population does not believe they are legally protected to capitalize on the remittances received in personal family businesses or joint ventures with those who provided the initial capital. What they could undertake today with tenacity and sacrifice may suddenly end with a new arbitrary regulation or the personal harassment of an untouchable bureaucrat.
THE “CUBAN MIRACLE”: FINANCIAL CAPITAL
Seen photos of the ruined state of Berlin and other western German cities after World War II, few would have thought they could recover in a short time. A survey of various experts’ opinions regarding the time it would take to reconstruct Cuba reveals an estimate of between five and seven years. We believe it will be between three and five. Three factors support this optimism: the island’s natural resources, its geographic proximity to the largest and most dynamic market in the world, and a diaspora of more than two million people. Added to this are the resources that can come from direct investment and development loans from international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.
But while these international resources are attracted from abroad, the Cuban diaspora will be an invaluable source of financial and human capital for national reconstruction. It’s not just the billionaires from exiles. Any Cuban interested in investing on the island, either alone or with family or friends living in Cuba, could ask their bank or credit card company for an estimate of the value of the line of credit they could extend, given the amount of their savings and property they can use as collateral for the loan. This is why, once freedom and legal security for private enterprise are restored, an investment flow—not just remittances for consumption, as is the case now—of more than $20 billion could be expected in the first three to five years to kick-start national reconstruction. The Cuban Miracle is guaranteed once Cuba is free and democratic.
THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE: HUMAN CAPITAL
But much more than financial capital is required to undertake national reconstruction. We also need to recover our social capital. Each profile in this series is simultaneously a tribute, a warning, and a reason to believe in the future. A tribute, because it shows what Cubans can achieve in freedom. A warning, because it reminds us that all that talent was expelled, stifled, or wasted by a system that fears individual initiative. But it is also an invitation to imagine the future.
A democratic and open Cuba, where talented people don’t have to emigrate to grow, but can build within their homeland. A Cuba where doctors, engineers, businesspeople, and artists who had to settle abroad find a space to contribute to the society where they were born, even without having to physically repatriate. What was once a brain drain will be transformed into a human capital gain when these compatriots—from anywhere in the world—can contribute with the knowledge and networks of personal and institutional contacts—acquired throughout their lives abroad—to the development of the country where they, their parents, and grandparents were born.
In the internet age, in a Cuba liberated from totalitarianism, remittances of knowledge will materialize without the need for exiles to return to live physically in Cuba. Doctors, surgeons, architects, engineers, economists, businesspeople, and members of other professions and associations will be able to provide services, advice, or teach classes remotely. Telemedicine will allow surgeons like Lamelas to be present in a Cuban hospital operating room and conduct a surgical operation, hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
On that day, remittances of knowledge will become the first engine of national rebirth. And that will also be the day when stories like those of Armando Codina, Irina Vilariño, Oriol Specht, and so many others cease to be tales of exile and become seeds of a shared future.
