Governments cannot design and build high quality consumer products like automobiles and televisions and they cannot design and build efficient sugar factories because governments do not have the motivation or the wealth to do these things.
Governments can expropriate the wealth but that very act kills the desired outcome. The best that government can do is wave a lot of money at the private sector in order to buy excellent fighter aircraft and such. It is the private sector that produces good stuff.
Up until now the outcome has been a communist slave plantation with Castro as owner and beneficary. Looks like he's just about wrung out the last bit of wealth from his revolution. Well, he has if the Democrats don't get their way.
Castro's Cuba Bad for Business ***Cuba's much-touted Foreign Investment Law No. 77 is, like the Shakespearean comedy, much ado about nothing. It fails to resolve problems such as the restricted liquidity of investments, high risk for foreign exchange losses and reversibility of investment agreements.
The experience of foreign investors in Cuba is replete with horror stories. In 1995, when the "liberalizing" law was passed, the Cuban government unilaterally canceled Spanish utility company Endesa's investments in hotels. Mexico's Grupo Domos found itself arbitrarily slapped with enormous back-tax penalties, and Canada's First Key Project Technologies' proposal to build a $350 million power plant was stolen by the Cuban government and shopped around elsewhere.
Cuba last year devalued its currency by 18 percent and fell behind in debt payments of $500 million to private banks and firms in France, Spain, Japan, Canada, Chile and Venezuela. (This does not include the repayment of government trade credits to France for the last four years and the principal on foreign debt of $35 billion.) With export prices down in nickel, sugar and tobacco, along with a fall in tourism and remittances from abroad, Cuba will remain an economic basket case. Doing business in countries that violate labor rights is not considered good business practice.***
March 2002 - Forbes.com The World's Billionaires - "Royal Flush" - Castro - $100 Million.