Cuba Entices Eager Entrepreneurs : Capitalists large and small expect the island to open up after 32 years of socialism. The big obstacle: Fidel Castro.

In Cuba, things have never been worse. Supplies of gasoline are short, food lines are long and discontent is reported to be deep and widespread.

In Miami, the hopes of many have never been higher.

“If Cuba opens tomorrow, it would be a major, major market,” says Carlos Alamilla, a food exporter who predicts he will be unloading Lipton soups and Kraft cheese on the docks in Havana within a year.

Alamilla isn’t the only one making plans to bring foodstuffs, consumer goods and American-style capitalism to 10 million Cubans suddenly free to browse through a free-market economy after 32 years of socialismo. Texaco, RJR-Nabisco, AT&T; and several other multinational companies also have been plotting a return to Cuba.

Planning for Change

“They are all interested in being prepared,” says University of Miami professor Jaime Suchlicki, a Cuba expert and consultant to Texaco and half a dozen other corporations.

Throughout South Florida, shippers, builders, plumbing and painting suppliers and even lawyers and accountants are making plans for the opening of a marketplace that has been off-limits for more than a generation.

But standing resolutely in the path of plans to set up everything from fast-food franchises to manufacturing plants on the island, which lies 200 miles south of Miami, is Fidel Castro. At age 65, the charismatic, autocratic Cuban president remains apparently hearty, very much in control of the Cuban state and firm in his commitment to socialism and anti-Americanism. And the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba is almost certain to remain in place as long as Castro does.

Nevertheless, many people here are mapping plans for a possible turn in a post-Castro Cuba toward democracy and an American-style consumer society.

“We have an internal task force working on it all the time,” says John Lynch, senior vice president of Seaboard Marine, the largest Miami-based shipping company. “There will be a massive movement into Cuba when it starts.”

Analysts agree that the woeful Cuban economy will require a major overhaul. The group that clearly expects to be the chief architect of that overhaul is the Cuban American National Foundation, a powerful lobbying group with solid connections to the White House and a controversial chairman in Miami millionaire Jorge Mas Canosa.

Mas, the godfather of both Radio Marti and TV Marti, the taxpayer-funded news and entertainment broadcasts to Cuba, has long been rumored to have ambitions to be president of a post-Castro Cuba.

Francisco Hernandez, the foundation president and a 30-year friend of Mas, denies that. The foundation, he says, has no political agenda for Cuba beyond democracy.

What has been discussed, however, is a plan “to re-integrate Cuba into the international economy,” says Tom Cox, a foundation official in Washington.

In addition to advancing ambitious ideas about what to do with Cuba’s banking, currency and electoral systems, a commission sponsored by the foundation has been talking with firms such as Bell South Enterprises and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines about revamping 17 key industries, including telecommunications and tourism, says Cox.

In Miami, where for more than three decades ripples in Cuba have caused waves of emotion, exiles are dreaming of reclaiming private property on the island, opening branches of their businesses there and even speculating on commercial bank loans to the Castro government that are now in default.

Jose Montes, who owns three McDonald’s franchises in Miami, including the only one in the world that sells Cuban-style coffee, says he would be happy to open the first American fast-food outlet in the country where he was born. “If the opportunity arises, you better believe McDonald’s is interested,” Montes said.

Market Guesswork

Gauging the potential of the Cuban market, or figuring out exactly what it would take to transform a communist state to capitalism, is a guess. Mas, shortly before traveling to Moscow last month to lobby Russian leader Boris N. Yeltsin to cut off all aid to Cuba, revealed that he has talked with Wall Street bankers about issuing bonds to finance the make-over and provide the Cuban citizenry with the cash to buy the refrigerators, televisions and stereos Miami entrepreneurs are hoping to import.

Miami’s Mayor Xavier Suarez estimates that the Cuban exile community alone has up to $2 billion ready to invest immediately.

Many times that amount would be available from corporations eager to re-enter Cuba. Texaco, for example, “wants to know about the state of Cuba’s oil refineries,” according to Suchlicki, including its own Santiago plant that was claimed by the revolutionary government soon after 1959.

Some describe exile plans for the capitalist takeover of Cuba as both imperialist and presumptuous.

“These post-Castro projects, whether hatched in Miami or Madrid, are miles away from Cuban reality because they don’t apply to the circumstance there,” says Arturo Villar, a business consultant who visits Cuba frequently.

“For example, the plan to give the economy a shock by privatizing, and eliminating state intervention in the economy. The Cuban people just don’t see that happening. It’s not what Cuba needs or wants.”

Hernandez of the Cuban American National Foundation agrees that the Cuban people will have to support the exiles’ plans for them to work. But he thinks they will.

“We want to modernize the thinking and attitudes of the Cuban people,” he said. “It might be presumptuous. But one of the faults of the transition in Eastern Europe and Russia is that they were not prepared. We are thinking for the Cuban people, and planning for those who at present don’t have the opportunity to think about anything except how to survive. We do not want to fail.”

Some of the euphoria that swept the Cuban community here in the wake of the communist collapse in Eastern Europe has cooled, says Suarez.

A Touch of Caution

“That imminent expectation has died,” Suarez says. “Now in conversations you hear more skepticism, more careful analysis of the situation. It could happen tomorrow. The simple, catalytic act of eliminating Castro, by a bullet or by a heart attack, would bring an incredibly quick change to that country. But I still think it’s going to take a while.”

In the meantime, Castro is making plans of his own. While preparing the Cuban people for another year of austerity, he concedes that a bit of capitalism is necessary to deal with a world in which most of his socialist trading partners are gone. For example, Castro recently announced plans to open 30,000 hotel rooms within five years.

Says Suchlicki: “There is reason for optimism, but it has to be tempered by the reality of the military apparatus in support of Fidel. Two years ago I said, ‘Buy your suitcases, but don’t pack yet.’ I think that’s still good advice.”