YEAH, THAT'LL WORK:

Many foreign investors being booted out of Cuba: Foreign business partners are being squeezed out of Cuba, which is turning to countries such as Venezuela and China. (MARC FRANK, 6/07/05, Financial Times)

It has been more than a decade since Cuba, suffering from a post-Soviet economic collapse and jitters about the United States, opened its door to foreign businesses.

Now many investors -- mainly European -- who took the plunge are being asked to leave.

Only half the homes rented to expatriates by the state's real-estate monopoly are now occupied, and at the Havana International School enrollment is down about a third from two years ago and falling.

On average, one joint venture and two smaller cooperative production ventures have closed each week since 2002, when there were 700 in the country. [...]

Relations with the European Union and other Western nations remain tense because of President Fidel Castro's repression of dissent, and Cuba is increasingly turning toward countries like such as China and Venezuela, which it sees as being less influenced by the United States.

Yet the purge appears to be related less to these factors than to recentralizing finance and trade and eliminating the partial autonomy that state concerns were granted in the 1990s.