this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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The food prices falling might actually result in a net negative impact on their economy.
If local producers can't viably compete with aggressively low priced American crops, they'll lose out heavily.
On the whole, the tourism will probably bring in a lot of money, but a good chunk of it would leave the island immediately, and they'd have to wrangle a flood of goods they didn't have to compete with before.
(A lot of Caribbean islands end up in situations where the major tourist hubs are owned by American companies that pay locals as little as possible and then ship the profits back to the US. So the island just sees the benefit of 40 jobs, not 200 high paying tourists a month)
the type of crops cuba grows arent the main exports that the U.S typically goes through. iirc theyre big on sugarcane and rice, neither of which are major US exports reletive to the global scale of exports.
at worst, the citrus market in cuba crumbles, but thats less significant than the above two.
You are comparing apples to apples but I think there is an issue of scale. It's like the apples that are produced by the tree out back (Cuba) vs the apples that are produced by the little stand the vineyard keeps for their fall cider (US). I don't have a lot of fruit trees out back so the couple basket fulls that apple tree produces is a huge portion of my fruit production but the vineyard's couple ton of apples is only a small portion of their fruit production.
For rice, the largest rice crop Cuba has ever produced in a single season is estimated to be 465k tons in 03/04. The US produced 11m tons and exported 3m tons of rice last year.
Edit: overstated US rice production do to not noticing a unit difference.
We actually export a huge amount of rice. https://fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/rice (3 million tons exported, to Cuba's 200k total production). We're actually the fifth largest exporter.
We also produce more sugar cane, but Brazil is the real power player there.
Cuba wouldn't be alone in being injured by US agricultural exports. Our volume and low cost can, for example, make people prefer imported American grains over domestic production, even if they're different types.
im not saying that we dont export more than cuba (i mean given population size, thats to be expected), its just that what yhey can supply for theirselves internally is enough to sustain their own use, at worst, their exports are worse, but they arent just competing against thr U. S in terms of exports so thats more or less moot point, given Brazil on its own is larger and a reasonable distance.
the U.S would have to shift a significant portion of its rice specifically to Cuba if it wanted to disrupt prices there, and that considers that rice is the main carb they intake, which theres a bunch of other carbs they grow in country for their own consumption to move over to if necessary.
their economy if not able to compete would switch from being less export of produce to a heavier focus on tourism similar to other carribean nations.
Oh, it's definitely not a definite thing that it would disrupt their farming, but cheap US agricultural products being introduced into a market has had negative impacts on other locations before, so it's not just a hypothetical.
It's not so much about deliberately trying to disrupt prices, more that the US doesn't send rice places, people bid on it. If a food distributor in Cuba finds that they can get rice cheaper from the US, they might opt to make that switch, or if they just bring in corn people might increase the corn in their diet since it's cheaper.
Tourism might not be the best choice for them, at least if offshore ownership is allowed. It often ends up providing jobs, but little of the money actually stays in the locale beyond wages and some minor commodities.
How Cuba having a more planned economy impacts all this is also an interesting thing to consider, since they could just dictate "no offshore resort owners, and minimum rice prices".