Havana Haven?

Forget Florida or Palm Springs. The hot new retirement spot: Cuba.

The latest Trends Journal newsletter, which tracks marketing and business trends, predicts the United States will eventually work out its differences with Fidel Castro, resulting in a lifting of the 34-year-old trade embargo.

That in turn will make Cuba not only a hot tourist destination, the newsletter argues, but also an attractive retirement spot.

“Aging baby boomers will see Cuba as affordable, having a warm climate and close to the United States,” the Rhinebeck, N.Y.-based journal argues, saying Cuba will “be seen as an ideal winter retreat among the next flock of ‘snowbird’ retirees.”

No Knock on Woodstock

The Trends Journal also says that the recent Woodstock 25th anniversary will indeed have some lasting effects, no doubt a disappointment to those hoping the hype over the event had finally ended.

First is “‘generation blending,” in which baby boom and generation X members “are converging in thought to form a 123-million person supersegment.”

Another is renewed activism, which the newsletter says will be less militant than in the past “due to the intergenerational mass.”

Finally, there will be “compassionate capitalism” as evidenced by one corporate sponsor at the recent Woodstock music festival letting hypothermia sufferers use its “climate-controlled hospitality tent” and a supermarket chain providing garbage bags for rain gear.

Hits Man

Who is the most famous man in music?

Michael Jackson? Frank Sinatra? The guy who used to be called Prince?

Hits magazine, the irreverent music trade publication, awarded the crown to unexpected name in its just-published 8th anniversary issue.

The winner: O.J. Simpson pal Robert Kardashian.

Kardashian is certainly well known, with his face frequently on the news as his friend faces murder charges. Although he hardly is known for his music work.

Kardashian runs a company that supplies music to theaters to play between shows, and another that sells compact discs in vending machines.

Kardashian responds in kind with a full-page ad, featuring a picture of Simpson running through the snow as a halfback for the Buffalo Bills, along with the words “Justice for the Juice.”

Briefly. . .

Aristo-Soft, a Pleasanton, Calif., software company, is introducing a Rush Limbaugh-inspired “Megadittos” computer screen saver for President Clinton bashers that pokes fun at the President, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Administration’s health plan and Vice President Al Gore. . . . The unorthodox “Future News Index” forecasting letter in Santa Monica says the market could be affected by turbulent news events, such as an attack on Haiti during a full moon in hurricane season. . . . Euphemism of the week for getting fired from a job: “non re-employment.”