July–August 2015
Article
Foreign Policy

The Secret of Singapore: Why Cuba Should Look to Lee Kuan Yew's Thriving City-State for Economic Inspiration

Format:Print

Abstract

Between 1965 and 1991, Singapore grew at an astonishing compound annual growth rate of nearly 14%. Critics of the island's performance accused its celebrated leader, Lee Kuan Yew, of thinly veiled tendencies toward communism and authoritarianism; they argued that the country's pace of growth was being artificially inflated by investment rates that would quickly prove impossible to sustain. Yet Lee and Singapore outlived, and outperformed, their detractors. The real reason behind Singapore's success was the country's unique understanding of what it had to offer the world and how to craft a development strategy around an honest appraisal of those assets. The Singaporean model is more powerful than dreaming and more likely to achieve results. And it is widely replicable, not with regard to the details of what Lee and his colleagues did, of course, but with regard to how. These are lessons that Cuba's next generation of leaders, unshackled from their predecessors' ambitious but ultimately unrealistic goals, would be well-advised to consider. Adapted from the source document.