Cuba's dilemma.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher
• Position: Self-reliance or global exchange

The Aerocaribe flight from Cancun to Havana was a far cry from the earlier American Airlines flight from Miami to Cancun. The aged plane rattled painfully as it hit the Cuban tarmac after just 40 minutes in the air, and the several dozen people who emerged onto the dark runway were clearly not tourists. Their luggage consisted of overstuffed plastic bags filled with such necessities as toothpaste, toilet paper, and foods not easily found in Havana these days.

The drive into town underscored the message, "You're not in Florida anymore," as our 1957 Chevy dipped jarringly into the deep pot holes that pock the main road into town. The trip was otherwise unimpeded since, even at mid-evening, there were virtually no other cars on the road. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, though, we could make out at the side of the road the forms of hundreds of people walking or cycling toward Havana.

Sometimes the best way to gain insight about something is to go where it is not. This issue of WORLD WATCH focuses on global capital flows - the unprecedented surge of private money that is having such profound influences on the world. Next to this stream of capital, Cuba - with its 11 million people squeezed onto a narrow 1,000-kilometer-long island - forms a quiet side-channel. It is trying to emerge from more than three decades of central planning, while shunted to the margins of the world economy by the 35-year trade embargo imposed by the superpower just 90 miles to the north.

The question for Cuba now is whether it can develop a more sustainable society while at the same time gradually opening its economy and political system.

I was invited to Havana in mid-February by the European organizers of an international environmental symposium who were keen to provide Cuban specialists with the opportunity to exchange ideas with foreign experts in the field. (I was one of just three U.S. citizens who came to the conference, armed with a Treasury Department license issued under the "Trading With the Enemies Act.")

In today's world, embargoes constrain not only economic trade but intellectual and cultural commerce as well. With their access to international mail, phone lines, and even the Internet constricted, the Cuban academics we met were hungry for any environmental information we could supply. My meager supply of Spanish-language editions of WORLD WATCH quickly dwindled, and dozens of Cubans scribbled their names on scraps of paper, begging me to send them a...