“How cheaply the new Carlos Saladrigas wants to buy us!” Fidel Castro wrote in 2008, at the age of 81, after illness had forced him to hand over political power to his brother Raúl and devote himself to churning out his Reflections in state media. According to Castro, Saladrigas, a successful Cuban American businessman from South Florida, was trying to take over Cuba “with Miami money.”

The claim came as a surprise to Saladrigas. Cuba had always been more of a drain on his finances than a source of profit. “Buying cheap has never been my goal. My aim has never been to make money in Cuba,” he says.

Saladrigas was born in 1948 in Havana’s then-affluent Miramar neighborhood. His father was a lawyer who worked for the Ministry of Education. His mother owned a fashion store that imported dresses. A year after the Cuban Revolution began, his mother told him he would be leaving the country alone under one of the so-called waiver visas, a special authorization issued by the U.S. government that allowed 14,000 Cuban children to enter the United States as part of what became known as Operation Peter Pan. It was a dark episode in which some children never reunited with their families, others disappeared from view, and some were victims of sexual abuse. In August 1961, young Saladrigas arrived in Florida.

“That decision was my mother’s. My father didn’t want it,” Saladrigas recalls from his home in Miami. “He was convinced, as many here were for years, that the Americans would not allow communism in Cuba and that they would do something. There were rumors that parental rights would be taken away in Cuba. Today it’s unclear whether those rumors were started by the CIA or by the Cuban government itself, but any scenario seemed possible. That frightened many parents, and my mother took the risk of sending me without knowing when we would reunite. I have four children, and every time one turned 12 my wife and I discussed this. Would we do the same or not? To this day I have never been able to answer that.”

His parents arrived the following year. Money was scarce. He dropped out of secondary school and later resumed his studies in evening classes. He went on to study business administration, attended Harvard Business School, worked for accounting firms and in real estate, and was eventually hired by PepsiCo.

He later left the corporate world and, in 1984, founded The Vincam Group, a pioneering human-resources management company. Before he sold it in 2000, it was considered the largest Hispanic-owned company of its kind in the United States. Since then, Saladrigas has founded three more companies and later sold them. The Peter Pan child had become a capitalist.

“I am a capitalist because I believe that, generally, when a country’s problems can be solved by markets, markets offer the best solution. But not all a country’s problems find answers in markets; that is the mistake many make,” he says. “That is why I believe one of the great errors of American capitalism has been taking market logic too far, into sectors that do not belong to the market but to the state.”

Today, Saladrigas is dedicated to advising, devising strategies, and supporting businesses. He devotes much of his time to thinking about Cuba, alongside the Cuba Study Group, the organization he co-founded to promote the growth of the private sector on the island. At this point in his life, at age 78, Saladrigas has come to realize what he considers to be a truth: that if there is one thing the Cuban government fears, it is money.

“That is, us — the exile community, the very exile community they created,” the businessman says. “Although individually it has been hard, the Cuban exile community as a group has succeeded in the arts, in academia and in business. That is due in part to our DNA as Cubans. That is why my optimism about Cuba’s future is based solely and exclusively on what I see of its people,” he explains. “The exile community has also been very generous in extending a hand to the Cuban people in every sense. That is part of the success: the fact that we have not forgotten Cuba.”

After more than half a century of building an ideological wall between those on the island and those outside it, the Cuban government, in the depths of its current crisis, has called on exiles to return and help revive the country’s ailing economy with their dollars.

When the government announced a package of measures in June as a first step toward liberalizing the economy, President Miguel Díaz-Canel declared: “To anyone who wants to build a future with Cuba, without seeking to impose anything on it, we say with our hearts on our sleeves: this is your home, and our door is open to you, because at this moment, this homeland cannot afford to lose a single good Cuban.”

Question. Would you be one of those Cubans willing to go and invest in Cuba?

Answer. Those of us Cubans who felt that deep attachment to Cuba are getting quite old. There is a sector of the community that 20 years ago, or under Barack Obama, would have been willing to go and set up businesses in Cuba. But many people already have what they call an investment horizon. When you are 30 years old, your investment horizon is long. When you are 78, it is short. I no longer see my investments there as long-term, because at some point I will not be here.

Q. And what could Cuba count on now?

A. We can count on all the family investment that exists here, which is large and important, and on many younger Cubans who are very interested in seeking new business opportunities in Cuba. But it is not what it would have been 30 years ago, because there is a whole generation emotionally tied to Cuba that achieved the most economic success because they have been here longer. That group is the least interested in the new adventure of moving to the island.

In the case of Venezuela, how many Venezuelans do you know who have gone back to invest there? None. Nobody who is already established here is going to go live in Cuba. So you cannot run a business there unless you partner with someone. That is why we have always thought the point is not to go invest alone, but to co‑invest with Cubans in Cuba. But there must be change. Right now it is unsustainable.

Q. What guarantees does an entrepreneur who wants to invest on the island today have?

A. Practically none. The idea that the exile community is the most logical point for Cuba’s economic salvation has been one we have put forward for years. We continue to think that the exile community will be a fundamental driving force of economic recovery — not the only one, but a very important one.

There are two sectors within the exile community that are essential. The family sector, which sends significant remittances. All that capital can be used to grow small businesses in Cuba. The other capital the exile community has is more formal capital, where you invest after conducting an investment analysis and assessing risks. That capital needs more formality in the country. Cuba will not have that formality until it has a stable macroeconomic climate and a serious banking system, a serious currency, and laws that respect private property. So that if you have a dispute with the government, you can take them to independent courts. None of that is being done.

Q. So political change is the first guarantee for any investor who sees an opportunity in Cuba…

A. Without political change, these measures lack seriousness and credibility. Last year the government seized all foreign currency bank accounts from the Vietnamese, its privileged partners. What credibility can this government have? None.

Q. After Díaz-Canel announced the new package of changes, people said Cuba was finally opening to capitalism. To what extent is that true?

A. The government hasn’t even talked about political change, and we don’t believe it will. Opening to what? They are taking measures that, although most of them we can criticize, are necessary and good — measures they should have taken 20 or 30 years ago. But it seems to me they themselves lack the capacity to manage the changes because they want to control everything. That is my first impression. The second is that the measures are destined to fail.

Q. Why?

A. Because Cuba has reached the end of the road. Every day, the situation gets worse. What is needed are deep, swift and sustained measures to open up the economy. Cuba cannot recover on its own at this point. It does not have the capacity.

Without a significant change in the judiciary, so that it is truly independent of the political sphere, it won’t work. Without fundamental changes to the system’s structure, constitutional changes that clearly state that Cuba is going to open up, and an end to the monopoly of a single political party, nothing will work. At the same time, if the United States does not lift the economic sanctions, Cuba will not recover.

Q. How much does the success of any reform effort depend on Washington?

A. The embargo’s sanctions, plus all the additional ones, have a cumulatively devastating impact on a market economy. Although the embargo limited Cuba, it did not finish off Cuba while Cuba was not a market economy. But now that Cuba has a new need — because it has no option but to open to the market — this is killing it because there is no investment and no inflow of money.

What I don’t understand about the [Trump] administration is its lack of clarity about its expectations. At the same time, the Cubans are playing a game of trying to do as little as possible, or at least to avoid the most significant reforms, and leaving the hardest issues for later to see what happens after November, whether the elections and the war with Iran prove distracting enough. That is a factor complicating everything.

I don’t know how much longer the Cuban people can endure this. It’s been five or six months since the administration imposed the oil embargo, and the aid the U.S. government has announced for a population that is dying of hunger is a drop in a bucket.

Q. What can we expect for Cuba from the Trump administration?

A. I highly value Cuban sovereignty and independence. Our people have shed much blood for it. The things I hear from Trump, if serious, worry me enormously. Words like: “I will be the president of Cuba,” or “Cuba is mine when I want it.” Those words reach deep into my heart. They are painful to hear. I don’t want Washington to be the one to solve Cuban problems. We have to solve them ourselves, exercising our autonomy.

On the other hand, I applaud that pressure has been put on a regime that has refused to change. Obama handed them change on a silver platter, and they chose not to seize the opportunity. It’s almost a schizophrenic scenario because I believe there is a great opportunity for a serious, sincere negotiation that could lead to solutions. But that requires Cuban leaders to be willing to engage.

Q. You have said Cuba first needs a stabilization period and then a reconstruction period. How would those be implemented?

A. The stabilization period runs from the moment the reforms begin until the point at which Cuba becomes an investment-grade destination for private capital. In other words, until private investors feel confident and secure enough to invest.

That will be the most difficult period because no one will invest heavily during that time. Meanwhile, schools and hospitals must be maintained, people must be fed, a tax system must be created, a banking system and an economy must be established, the peso defended, the Cuban currency strengthened. These are things that must happen in the first three, four or five years at most. I hope it does not take longer because if the measures are slow, the people will continue to go hungry.

Q. And after that?

A. Once Cuba is stabilized, foreign investment will begin to arrive, large companies will be created, factories established, people will have jobs, Cuba will have agricultural production. The electricity system will stabilize, the government will stabilize. At that point, at the end of the stabilization period, free elections can be held. A new government will be established. There must be a new constitution and that constituent process must be participatory for the people. There must be openness. It cannot be done in secret. Transparency is the most important thing for Cuba’s future, and we must achieve it. One of the things we have recommended and continue to recommend is a kind of Marshall Plan for Cuba.

Q. How would that Marshall Plan proposal work without losing sovereignty?

A. It must be a pact in which Cuba commits to implementing these changes while maintaining its independence, but the United States should remove all sanctions by executive order for a period of two to three years until Cuba implements the measures. At that point, a Marshall Plan for Cuba would be prepared, where loans could be granted on very long terms, repayable later or even forgivable. That money would be used to restore the power grid, support schools, public order, hospitals — all the activities the country needs.

Then the private sector will experience extraordinary growth. SMEs will expand. Cuba will begin to produce food. That is where healing and stabilization begin. For the United States, it would be the best investment, as it was in Japan after the war. We must learn to understand our sovereignty as something different from what José Martí may have envisioned. Martí feared economic integration, but today economic integration is almost inevitable.

Q. Would there be anything in the Cuban system worth preserving in that future country?

A. Two sectors must be saved because they are very important: health and education, and they must be accessible to the entire population. No one truly understands what socialism is, neither in Cuba nor in Miami. However, there are many European countries where socialism has produced extraordinary results, but those are socialisms within a market. As I said in Havana many years ago: Cuba has been very efficient and very good at managing poverty, but disastrous at creating wealth, and without wealth you cannot solve poverty. We are at a new starting point, with a great opportunity to create something better. We can distill a system that works for Cuba, one that harnesses the full strength of markets while also retaining the sense of humanity we want Cuba to have.

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