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Today, I am sharing a podcast with an amazing Cuban musician, Harold Lopez-Nussa, which you can hear here. As I re-listened to our talk while tracking Ukraine events and digesting a rich conversation at a Nicosia coffee bar, I kept coming back to the same old but important idea: don’t forget geography.
By geography, I mean physical boundaries, or lack thereof, such as the claustrophobic, impoverished streets of Havana, where Harold grew up, the surrounded-by-belligerent-neighbors Ukraine or the often-overrun Cyprus. Because America is blessed with a relatively open government and favorable geography, it’s a lesson that’s easy for me and perhaps many others to forget.
Cuba
Harold is very gifted. I am grateful he made time for our chat. Perhaps he would have accomplished the same virtuoso if he had been raised in Cleveland. But I doubt it.
In our conversation, he described a very particular upbringing. He was born into a family of musicians in a country that both worships music and where music, like baseball, is a way out. An impoverished island creates an incentive that does not exist in nearly the same degree in Cleveland.
There was a time under Obama when it was possible to fly from La Guardia to Havana. My wife, son and I took the trip. The poverty was glaring—hanging wires in the street, crumbling houses, food lines, hunger. Despite being in the middle of an ocean, locals could not easily buy fish because the government lacked refrigerated trucks to get the catch from docks to stores. Every night we heard a different band. You listen to music differently in such a place. Evidently you play it differently, too.
Geography influenced Cuba in one more way. Because it was both socialist and close to the US, the Soviet Union embraced Cuba. In Russia, classical music training is incredibly strong and some of that made its way down to Cuba. Harold studied in a conservatory with teachers who trained in Russia.
Ukraine
Geography is a potent force in the Ukraine crisis as well.
To be clear, the crisis is a Putin invention. Given nukes, the US and Russia can threaten each other just fine with or without NATO. Putin views forcibly expanding borders as less a violation of international law and more a sign of strength. This is medieval-era thinking.
But such thinking is likely tied to Russia’s geography. Russia is vast and corrupt, which makes it tough administer and defend. Flying over it makes the trip from New York to LA seem easy. Russia has been invaded three times (Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Kahn) and faces unrest within its borders, in Chechnya. Its neighbors include North Korea, China and Azerbaijan versus, for the US, Canada and Mexico. The treasure in the ground––oil, natural gas, palladium, platinum and gold—pays for Russia’s guns.
Geographically, Ukraine is perched on a cultural fault line, part Eastern, part Western. Given that Ukraine is, like Russia, also easy to invade, it has been occupied and absorbed many times—by Germans, Poles, Russians and others. The recent resurgence of a strong national identify and clear Western tilt is both understandable and geopolitically disruptive. Ukraine’s natural resources—agriculture rather than oil—are less lucrative, which equals a weaker military.
Cyprus
I had the good fortune to meet with a thoughtful local at a Nicosia coffee shop. I sipped a flat white and she indulgently answered my endless questions. She wore an overcoat in what counts as Cyprus winter, high 50s.
If the Mediterranean is the cradle of civilization, Cyprus is the pillow. There are 2500-year-old jugs in a museum that in form look a lot like a water jug in any modern kitchen. Today, Cyprus has just over 1 million people and falls directly into the path of whatever dominant power is trying to spread its influence across the Mediterranean––Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Brits or the European Union.
“It’s marked our psyche,” said my interlocuter. Her grandparents were sheep herders, she has a PhD, the benefits of hard work and living through an economic upswing.
Russian officialdom is plagued with what I’d describe as insecure, sometimes messianic nationalism. In Cyprus, one finds instead an almost excessive ideological flexibility—they are accustomed to bending to greater forces. This was evident long ago—the language is Greek, not Cypriot—and evident today. About ten years ago, one great power, Russia, flooded local banks with money, which promptly bought a lot of Greek bonds that later collapsed in value, requiring another great power, the EU, to bail Cyprus out.
The Digital Overlaid Upon the Ancient
Technology is layered on top of these ancient geographic forces and the two interact in odd ways. On Twitter, I watch Russian and Ukrainian soldiers hurl profanities, in English, at each other across the front line. We are superficially much more familiar with one another but lack context, like feeling the geography in our bones.
The digital revolution, now segueing into the artificial intelligence revolution, is happening so fast that a lot of activity is occurring that might seem, in retrospect, like a vast misallocation of resources. For instance, hundreds of millions of people can stream Harold’s music on Spotify, but neither Harold nor Spotify make much money on this. Less than 1% of Spotify’s creators get paid, but that is enough to wipe out most of Spotify’s profits, as the great chart from Rose Technology shows below (as usual all these wonderful charts are from Rose!).
The far less sexy business of concert tickets, essentially buying geographic proximity, is both how Harold gets paid and what has allowed concert ticket-seller Live Nation to narrow the stock gap with Spotify. Markets are a useful window into what parts of this new world might persist.
So follow Harrold on social media and next time he comes to town, buy tickets. You won’t regret it.
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