Is Cuba the Next Emerging Market for American Architects?

When Abby Gordon, a designer at Shepley Bulfinch in Boston, entered the competition to win her firm’s travel fellowship, she had only one destination in mind: Cuba. “I knew I had to go,” says Gordon, who has traveled extensively in Latin America and visited Mexico as part of a class at the Boston Architectural College (BAC) on Luis Barragán. Gordon’s BAC professors had previously taken students to Cuba, and she was enthralled by their photos of the island, as well as by Unfinished Spaces, a 2011 documentary about the National Art Schools outside of Havana, their astonishing brick vaults begun in the first flush of the Cuban Revolution and never finished.

Gordon won the fellowship, and in late June, she left Boston on a 30-day journey. She planned to trace the course of the revolution through the island and, of course, tour the capital of Havana. With its collection of Neoclassical, Baroque, Art Deco, and modernist architecture, Havana, founded in 1519, has “the most impressive historical city centre in the Caribbean and one of the most notable in the American continent as a whole,” according to UNESCO. The organization has named Old Havana a World Heritage site, along with the centers of three other Cuban cities: Trinidad, Cienfuegos, and Camagüey.

Gordon’s timing couldn’t be better. In January, the U.S. government relaxed restrictions for Americans wishing to travel to Cuba, just a month after President Barack Obama restored diplomatic ties with the island nation. Between January and May, the number of Americans who visited the country surged by 36 percent, a Cuban economist told the Associated Press.

The ramifications go beyond the prospect of direct flights and weekend mojito breaks. Only 90 miles from Florida, with endless beaches and the still-unpolished jewel of Havana, the island beckons to real-estate developers and architects. With the easing of diplomatic relations, will Cuba soon become the next big emerging market for American firms?

The U.S. embargo, which prohibits Americans from spending money or doing business on the island, remains in place and has staunch defenders, like Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio (R) and New Jersey’s Sen. Robert Menendez (D). Opinions differ as to its staying power. New York architect Belmont Freeman, FAIA, who is half Cuban and has spent considerable time on the island, thinks the fall of the embargo is inevitable. But, given the ill-will between Congress and the president, he says, “I have a feeling it won’t happen until the next presidential administration.”

On the other hand, Joseph Scarpaci, a geographer and professor emeritus at Virginia Tech who has written extensively about Cuba, says that hardliners in Congress will ensure that the embargo survives for the foreseeable future. “Obama’s announcement, it’s wishful thinking,” he says. He also points out that foreign investment in Cuba is nothing new; it began in the 1970s and gained steam in the ’90s. “Americans are late to the beach party, if you will,” he says. Spanish, French, and Canadian companies have long been building beach resorts and swanky hotels in Havana through joint ventures with the Cuban government. And much of the island’s waterfront access has already been sewn up, particularly on the northern shore. The beach town of Varadero, for instance, has numerous hotels operated by Spain’s Iberostar and Melia chains, and Canada’s Royalton brand runs resorts in both Varadero and Cayo Santa María.

A more promising opportunity for American firms may be medical tourism. José Gelabert-Navia, AIA, is the regional director for Latin America at Perkins+Will. He was born in Cuba, where his father, also an architect, held a prominent position in Fidel Castro’s government before fleeing to the U.S. (“He was very much with the revolution until he was against the revolution,” his son says.) Cuba has a lot of doctors, and they are renowned globally for their skill. “The level of education [in Cuba] is pretty high,” Gelabert-Navia says. “When we combine the fact that you have a country that’s only 90 miles away from the U.S., if you talk about doing hospitals, you know you can staff [them] with Cuban doctors.” Maybe, in a decade, some Americans will be hopping a flight to Havana for Lasik surgery or a facelift.

But Gelabert-Navia also envisions a growing market for new hotels as well as mixed-use and institutional projects. There’s hunger for it now, he says. “I’m getting calls, … ‘What are we doing in Cuba? Are we positioning ourselves to do something in Cuba?’ … My answer to all of them is: There is an embargo in place.”

Would-be investors would face other obstacles even if the embargo were lifted. Over the past several years, Cuban President Raúl Castro has instituted a series of economic reforms (for instance, allowing banks to make loans to individuals and Cubans to purchase real estate) that encourage investment and entrepreneurship. But Cuba is still tightly controlled by its Communist government. Joint ventures are how foreign companies can enter the island, and the terms are less than ideal: a 51/49 split, with the Cuban government retaining the majority share.

Cuba has no independent judiciary, no free press, and a long track record of seizing private assets. As recently as 2012, the government jailed several prominent foreign businessmen, including a British architect, Stephen Purvis, whose investment group Coral Capital had worked on hotel and golf course projects on the island; some were charged with spying or corruption after spending months in prison, then expelled from the country. Gelabert-Navia says his own cousin had his dairy-production plant confiscated by the government. “If the embargo [is] lifted, it’s going to be a complicated thing to give assurances that these investments are protected. That confidence has to be restored.”

Ultimately, Cuba may emerge from communism as China and Vietnam did, with a form of state-run capitalism fueled by foreign investment. Even now, on joint-venture projects, foreign architects team up with their Cuban counterparts, not unlike the Chinese system that pairs overseas firms with local design institutes.

As Gordon prepared to fly to Cuba in June, John Pilling, a Boston architect who taught her at the BAC, returned from leading a people-to-people tour of Havana. Pilling used to run a joint studio with Pérez-Hernández: students at the BAC and at Cuba’s largest architecture school, the Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverría (or CUJAE), spent a semester working on a design problem in parallel, and then the Americans traveled to Cuba at the end of the semester. Pilling says graduates of CUJAE’s five-year course have skills that are roughly comparable to their American counterparts, but with one major difference. The Cubans, he says, have “an inherent understanding of how to build in the tropics with limited budgets.” (After the Bush administration set tighter restrictions on travel study, the studios stopped.)

But study-abroad programs are poised to grow again, especially because Americans now view Cuba more favorably than they have in 20 years, at least according to a recent Gallup poll. Nevertheless, many Cuban Americans—especially the older generation, and especially in Florida—remain strongly opposed to any engagement with the Castro regime. Cheryl Jacobs, the executive vice president of AIA Miami, plans to host a panel about American architects and Cuba’s future, a topic, she admits, that evokes “a lot of strong feelings” among local architects. Miami is home to the National Association of Cuban Architects, a group that describes itself as continuing in exile the pre-revolutionary Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos de Cuba (CNAC); one of its goals is to promote the restoration of democracy on the island. (My attempts to contact several members of the association’s board were unsuccessful.)

Younger Cuban Americans are more likely to support the new changes to U.S. policy, and in some cases, even their parents and grandparents have softened their stance. “For a lot of Cubans like my parents, that left because they were forced to … they came to the States with no money. They had to rebuild completely,” Gelabert-Navia says. “For that generation, the government in Cuba was evil personified.” Although he has had plenty of opportunities to visit Cuba, Gelabert-Navia never has, on account of his parents. “I always felt a sense of betrayal to them.”

Now, he says, his parents are older. They “feel they only have so much time left.” And they have asked to go back to Cuba, one last time.