Quartz Weekend Brief—The new Cuba, the secret to Uber, Calatrava’s critics, the sand mafia
Good morning, Quartz readers!
It is already far from being the place it used to be. The once proudly tattered mansions of central Havana sport fresh paint jobs and modern fittings. Those magnificent old American gas guzzlers not reduced to rust or scrap have largely been turned into tourist limos. Air-conditioned buses speed travelers across the island, there are hotels that are neither exorbitant nor terrible, and the food is sometimes even described as “mind-blowing.”
The thaw in US-Cuba relations that began this week promises to accelerate this modernization. Though lifting the US embargo is still up to the recalcitrant Republicans who will, as of January, control Congress, their resistance is bound to crumble by 2018, when Raúl Castro has said he will cede power—most likely to Miguel Díaz Canel, a reformist who was not even born when Fidel took control in 1959. From there, Cuba’s abundant beaches, proximity to the US, and the ruthless entrepreneurialism that only Communism can hone should do the rest. Costa Rica is sometimes cited as a model.
But here’s a scary thought: What if it’s more like a small, Caribbean Russia? What some call a military oligarchy (paywall), dominated by Fidel’s compañeros and their families, runs the country’s emerging model of state capitalism. Individual Cubans may be enterprising, but the steady river of tourist dollars has flowed largely into state coffers. Corruption and kleptocracy are increasingly the norm. As the Castros’ grip fades, these new rich will wield the power, and they, like Russia’s oligarchs, won’t take kindly to efforts to break their monopolies. And what happens when a weak state is right on the drug route from Latin America to the US? The Castros tried to block smuggling. Their successors may be less diligent.—Gideon Lichfield
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Five things on Quartz we especially liked
The secret to the Uber economy: wealth inequality. The internet is commonly hailed as making Uber and other on-demand services possible. But, argues Leo Mirani, really all they require, besides customers, is a class of people willing to work for low pay without job security—a class that was historically large in poor countries, and is growing in the West.
China’s comically unsophisticated propaganda machine. The Communist party pays meagre sums to hundreds of thousands of wangpingyuan, or internet commentators, to influence online debate. Courtesy of a trove of emails published online, Nikhil Sonnad discovers how local officials manage this huge yet entertainingly inept cottage industry.
Some pilots really hate us. We thought David Yanofsky’s article last week on the pilots of Instagram might ruffle a few feathers, but we didn’t expect a vitriolic hate campaign and death threats. Zach Seward writes about it, while for all photographer-pilots, Yanofsky offers an simple diagram of the not-so-simple rules governing when you may and may not snap a picture from the cockpit.
The bizarre industry of fantasy sports. It’s worth about $11 billion, it involves fake teams made of real players, and it exists at least partly thanks to a barely rational loophole in America’s ban on gambling. John McDuling explains why games of the imagination are a growing part of the US’s sporting scene.
The t-shirt that tracks America’s race debate. A young designer has been making t-shirts with a simple design: the names of unarmed black men killed by police. The list keeps getting longer. Her sales keep growing. Melvin Backman writes about a place where fashion, business, and politics all meet, and somehow co-exist without offending anyone.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
Where the oil price plunge came from. It’s a complex story, “involving rebels and Indonesian cabdrivers as well as Texas roughnecks and Middle Eastern oil ministers.” Oil prices have halved in the last few months, but Russell Gold in the Wall Street Journal traces the collapse back to its roots a few years ago (paywall).
Why does everyone hate Santiago Calatrava? The Spanish architect behind bridges of breathtaking elegance and beauty is now everyone’s object of scorn for projects that perform poorly and go over budget. Karrie Jacobs in FastCo Design surveys the facts behind his battered reputation and argues that at least some of it is undeserved.
Landmines are a leopard’s best friend. The 20-30 million mines planted during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s continue to kill and injure people. But they also help keep the Persian leopard safe from poachers in the Kurdish region bordering the two countries. The cats—lighter than men, and with their weight distributed across four legs—rarely trigger the explosives, Peter Schwartzstein writes for National Geographic.
Legend of the troll hunters. Online harassment and hatred flourish with anonymity, even (or maybe particularly) in progressive Sweden. A show called Trolljägarna (Troll Hunter) where a journalist confronts the worst offenders is a minor hit, and a group of researchers has built a group dedicated to exposing them. Adrian Chen explores the process, consequences, and morality of unmasking trolls at the MIT Technology Review.
The sand mafia’s victims. An illicit mining trade provides cheap sand to India’s ravenous construction industry. And now it’s being blamed for the accidental deaths of an elite group of college students. Tom Lasseter and Rakteem Katakey at Bloomberg examine how such a brazen, large-scale industry of theft manages to operate with impunity.
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, fancy bridge designs, and troll stories to [email protected]. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.