Before any Chamber of Commerce types flock down to Cuba to cash in on all that slave labor, there’s one thing they might want to remember.
Communist dictatorships like money. They don’t like capitalist pigs. They’re also corrupt and if you fail to pay off the right guy at the right time, no matter how many autographed photos of Fidel you have hanging on the wall, you’ll be eating bread and water, if you can get it, for the rest of your life.
Because this isn’t America. Canadian businessmen like Cy Tokmakjian found that out the hard way.
A Cuban court has sentenced Canadian executive Cy Tokmakjian to 15 years in prison. Two of his aides received sentences of 12 and 8 years, and Cuba seized about $100 million worth of the company’s assets, the Ontario-based transportation firm said in a statement.
Ontario-based Tokmakjian Group said the charges against its president, Cy Tokmakjian, 74, were concocted as an excuse to seize the automotive firm’s $100 million in assets in Cuba. The company described the case Saturday as “absurd” and a “travesty of justice.”
You’re doing business under a Communist dictatorship that massacres its own people. You were expecting justice?
“This is a tricky situation,” says Raffi. Cy, 74, the Tokmakjian Group’s founder and owner, has been a prisoner in Cuba since that day, imprisoned without charges and then accused of bribery and “economic crimes” that the family and many others insist are false and which appear to be part of a political struggle.
Cy was on good terms with Fidel Castro, who was Cuba’s president from 1959 to 2008. Things went sour for the Tokmakjian Group — and other Canadian and international businesses — when Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, became president.
“He is by no means the first foreign businessman to suffer such a fate in Cuba. In February, another Canadian businessman, Sarkis Yacoubian, was suddenly expelled from Cuba where he had first been held without charges like Cy and then sentenced to nine years at La Condesa. Yacoubian, who operated a $30-million transport company called Tri-Star Caribbean, was arrested in July 2011, two months before Cy, yet was only charged in April 2013, accused of bribery, tax evasion and “activities damaging to the economy.”
Yacoubian was convicted and sentenced even though he agreed to cooperate with Cuban authorities. French national Jean-Louis Autret and British businessman Stephen Purvis were also jailed, and later freed, with their assets being seized by the Cuban interior ministry.
The assets are always the endgame. When you’re doing business with Communists who believe in nationalizing assets, it’s like dining out with a tiger. No matter how well trained the tiger is, he has to overcome the natural instinct to eat what’s on your plate and eat you too.
This keeps happening in China and Russia because Communist and ex-Communist leaders still function in familiar patterns. Americans who rush in to do business in Cuba would do well to learn why Canadian businesses are headed for the exit.
While 50 per cent of Cuba’s tourists are still Canadians desperate to escape the harsh winter, other Canadian companies who once worked happily in Cuba are escaping the island.





















