When I used to live in Canada, I had a client who was a Cuban defector. He had been studying at architecture school in Moscow Russia and when his plane landed in Canada for refueling he jumped out and claimed asylum. I met him when he had been in Canada over 25 years.

He told me that Cuba was so poor, that as an architect everything he came up with was beyond the budget. So for example, he would design a bridge. It would use too many materials and so there would be revision after revision until the final bridge was the least complicated slab of concrete. He left because it was just such a disappointment and a compromised life where a human was unable to rise to their full ability.

A few days later, I had another client who happened to be a Canadian architect. She had been working at these international firms and had built stuff all over the world. She told me that building was easy everywhere but Canada. In Canada there would be zoning, architectural controls, historical preservation, environmental review and on and on. Every building was going through multiple redesigns and the process was so slow that it often bankrupted projects or wasted tons of money. The “budget” for a project would be vaporized in all these intangible delays, repeating rounds of re-designs, lengthy approvals and so on, and every time it made the project cost more and deliver less. She was intensely frustrated that you couldn’t just deliver the best thing you could design.

The Cuban architect in Canada worked in woodworking making kitchen cabinets. He didn’t do any architecture.

ive been watching how its played out for a long time and its pretty much a complete shitshow now. There are some videos where people sneak off into the non-tourist areas and really see what living is like and its bleaker than its ever been. All the cuban post soviet successes have really ultimately succumbed to entropy at this point. Sadly a lot of the successes that were sociopolitical innovation have not really been well documented , things like different types of ownership and use structures of land or distribution, cooperative organization and subsidiarity etc… , things that were sort of clearing away cultural and legal impediments to production , distribution and consumption that would be perfectly applicable in 1st world democratic capitalist bureaucratic hellscapes as well. Look at how illegal sustainability is in places like california for example, or how housing is in incredible deficit purely from self imposed artificial scarcity. There was substantial institutional reform in cuba but it still ultimately couldnt fight physics , too little too late when losing primary inputs like energy. It wouldnt surprise me to see worst of all worlds for somewhere like the usa. no institutional reform to take the edge off