Interesting TED Talk: Turn Guantanamo into Hong Kong

I stumbled across these videos a while back from TED Conferences (Technology, Entertainment, and Design). The talks are typically in the 10 to 20 minute range and cover all sorts of subjects - arts, science, industry, international development, health, philosophy, you name it. Since I have time to do so here in Montana, I've generally been watching one as I eat my breakfast every morning. The one I found today was particularly interesting to me as an internationalist and Cuba enthusiast. The speaker, Paul Romer, a Stanford Economist, proposes an idea of creating charter cities in developing countries which would allow those countries to change their rules and norms about socio-economic development.

His model is Hong Kong, which operated on a capitalist industrial system long before the rest of mainland China and has in recent years served as a model for China to create other special economic zones and shift toward a more beneficial market economy. In this talk, Romer suggests that Guantanamo Bay has a great opportunity to become the next Hong Kong and as such could help to modernize the entirety of Cuba and the Caribbean. In short, his suggestion is for Raul Castro to start talking with Canada (and possibly Brazil) in order to create a joint venture to take over Guantanamo from the United States, preserve it's special status, and build a modern, industrial, charter city there.

I think he may be a little bit optimistic about the chances of the U.S. ceding control of the region to Canada. His claim is that with our recent "PR problem" at Guantanamo the U.S. is interested in extricating itself from the area. However, he fails to understand two critical points. First is the importance of Guantanamo's location on major Caribbean shipping and sea lanes, a location which the U.S. is likely to hold onto for reasons of defense and regional stability. Second is that as long as U.S.-Cuban relations remain frosty, the U.S. is not likely to indulge such a grand gesture which has such potentially positive effects for Cuba.

My own humble suggestion would be for Castro - if he is truly interested in developing and modernizing his country, which to some degree I believe he is - to use the proposed agreements with Canada or Brazil to engage the U.S. and bring it into the project as well as a means of improving relations. President Obama is likely much more amenable to a reasonable thawing of relations than either of his previous two predecessors were, especially now that Raul is firmly established in power and his polarizing elder brother is out of the spotlight. A proposal which preserves the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo but also opens the surrounding area for development into a functioning port and international charter city - all of which would have the benefit of reducing the threatening nature of Cubans to the base and the base to Cubans - would certainly be difficult to negotiate or put together, but I do not think that such a proposal would be rejected out of hand by the U.S. A proposal to leave Guantanamo and transfer control to Canada certainly would be.

That's my two-cents'-worth on the subject. My arguments of the details aside, Paul Romer's ideas are very interesting and compelling suggestions for a way to overcome the stagnancy and growth-limiting rules of developing countries. The video is worth 20 minutes of your time.

CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO: Paul Romer's Radical Idea: Charter Cities