In the town where I grew up in the outskirts of Havana, two bodegas still stand. The main one, which my father administered for a time, operates in the town’s main intersection, right by the main bus stop. The smaller one serves customers from the poorer sections of the town, off the secondary street.
Why would a town of fewer than three thousand people need two government-run bodegas seems like a mystery, except it was an accident of history. Both stores were private businesses expropriated by the Socialist regime in 1968. What may seem remarkable is that both bodegas were built and run by immigrants, one from Galicia (Spain) and the other from mainland China.
Entrepreneurial Minorities
Galician and Chinese, in fact, dominated small retail trade in pre-Socialist Cuba. Both ethnicities are famous—or infamous—for their frugality and work ethic. They slowly pushed out ‘native’ Cubans from the trade, by outcompeting them. This didn’t make them popular with the population at large—to this day “Galician Jokes” and “Chinese Jokes” are a staple of Cuban humor. The story of Galician and Chinese immigrants in Cuba has been repeated all over the World, though with other minorities, succeeding in foreign lands.
History provides many examples of such minorities. In medieval Europe Jews dominated money-lending, as well as much every trade available to them. The majority population hated them for it. (During anti-Jewish riots, one common target was the city’s archives, where money-lending debts were recorded and archived). A similar dynamic developed in the Ottoman Empire, where Jews and Armenians became richer than the Muslim masses, earning their enmity. When the Young Turks ruling the Ottoman Empire committed the Armenian holocaust, they relied on and unleashed some old hatreds.
Moving into recent history, you could say minorities built Latin America. Most industrial and agricultural developments were spearheaded by foreigners. The high-quality coffee grown in Central America, for example, was largely a project of German immigrants. In Argentina and Uruguay, the late-arriving Italians out-competed the criollos of Spanish background. But the true entrepreneurial minorities are Jews again, and Lebanese immigrants. The complaints against them ring familiar; the Lebanese live frugally, they employ their children in their stores, they are clannish. Jews, meanwhile, are greedy, they force their children to study, and they, too, are clannish. Rather than engendering admiration their success breeds resentment.
Several minorities have occupied that social niche in the United States. First, as usual, the Jews. Jewish peddlers crisscrossed the United States selling wares to homesteads. Some of them built larger enterprises. Children and grandchildren of emigrant Jews would go on to make their mark in science and the professions.
Chinese immigrants, often starting from the harsh life of a coolie laborer, managed to get a foothold in the West of the United States. The familiar pattern followed—hard work, frugality, and investment in the future eventually pays off, often against the enmity of the majority. In recent decades, Indian and Korean immigrants have followed the same path.
The Future of Entrepreneurial Minorities
I expect the phenom of entrepreneurial minorities to continue indefinitely. Groups have specialized in this economic niche for millennia; no reason to stop now. Unfortunately, I expect the envy, the resentment, and the social tensions between the economically successful minority and the less successful majority to continue too.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Because envy does not follow the success of others the way ducklings follow their mom. We could choose to find in their success inspiration, and admiration. Life would be better if more of humanity would feel that way.
