Cuba the Next Cancun? It Should Be So Lucky Josh Barro - The New York Times
go to original December 18, 2014

On the beach in Cancun in 2013. The resort area was developed decades ago by an arm of the Mexican central bank. (Alonso Cupul/European Pressphoto Agency)

One of the stranger reactions to the news of normalized relations with Cuba has come from several commentators who fret that Cuba will lose its authenticity under capitalist influence. As Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept put it: “I’m glad I got to visit several times before US tourists try to turn it into Cancun.”

This fear — that Cuba will be spoiled by vulgar American capitalism — is pretty insulting to Cubans, who ought to be able to decide for themselves where to spend their money. But while many commenters focused on Starbucks or McDonald’s, Mr. Scahill’s formulation about Cancun was especially inapt.

That’s because Cancun isn’t a symbol of free market capitalism, and American tourists didn’t make the place what it is today. An arm of the Mexican central bank did, in perhaps the largest and most successful example of central economic planning in North American history. Cuba should be so lucky as to have made its planned economy work as well as Cancun’s.

In the late 1960s, Cancun Island was essentially vacant. Its development as a tourism megaresort was conceived by bureaucrats at the Fund for the Promotion of Tourism Infrastructure (“Infratur”), part of the Banco de Mexico. In 1972, Robert Dunphy of The New York Times interviewed Antonio Enriquez Savignac, the head of Infratur, about the process that led to the Cancun megaproject.

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