"Foreign companies running hotels in Cuba reported recently that their once-lax government partners were no longer paying out profits unless the hotels achieved the exact profit margins required by their contracts."
"But Castro so far has shown no signs of favoring new reforms..."
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Abysmal credit ratings, huge defaults on foreign debt, crazy and arbitrary fiscal, monetary and commercial policy. Do you begin to see why any sort of investment in Castro's Cuba is foolhardy? Without civil liberties and true private property ownership, free enterprise is impossible. And without free enterprise, Cuba's economy will always have to be propped up by things like foreign subsidy and government drug trafficking. But civil liberties are what Castro and company understandably fear the most, whether it is extended to foreign investors or to Cubans themselves. Such a government cannot be "worked with" or "cajoled" by encouraging with trade the very conditions that Castro will not permit.