The Cuban government has not commented on the CANCC itself. But traditionally such groups prompt indignation among revolutionaries who insist they will not be forced out by their critics in Miami.
I ask some guests if they can appreciate the irony that the same people who support a major source of the island’s misery – the decades-long US economic embargo and the current fuel blockade – are now hatching plans for its reconstruction, without the input of most Cubans.
For Cuban-American agricultural expert Hugo Orizondo it is only practical to draw up a road map to Cuban development. “Right now, Cuba is like a black hole, we don’t know what is happening over there,” he admits. “But we do know the potential [for investment].”
Orizondo says he understands the reticence among Cubans to see foreign investors buying up something as sensitive as the rights to arable land. “But what are they going to do with it?” he retorts. “When investors come, they bring money and technology into the land.”
Both are urgently needed, he says, if Cuba is ever to produce enough to feed its own population and break its reliance on food imports.
Land titles lie at the heart of any reconstruction project put forward by this generation of wealthy Cuban Americans. Juan Omar Sixto says his father lost five properties and a farm in Cuba’s Pinar del Rio province to the revolution. While he insists he has no intention of removing any family living in those homes, he does want compensation for the nationalised land.
“I worked on that farm for five years of my life with my father, and they took it away. I want restitution or compensation. Even if they give me just a penny on the dollar, I’ll take it.”
“It’s moral justice,” he argues.
The Cuban government portrays such historic title claims as bitterness by a corrupt landed gentry who made fortunes on the backs of indentured workers and slaves. Both slavery and the system of indentured workers didn’t end in Cuba until the late 19th Century.
The government also argues that the exiles could never stand that Castro passed land reforms which handed over their fields to the workers and the state.
“Most of our sugar mills have been dismantled, but we will recover those lands and put them into production,” says Nicolás Gutiérrez, the president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba, an exile organisation championing the title claims.
“I’m not promising it will be in sugar,” he says.
“It might be in ethanol, co-generation, solar panels or water purification cells. Who knows? There are a lot of different options,” he remarks. “We need to get them producing, we need to have a real wage paid to Cuban workers and create a multiplier economic effect across the island.”
