LIGHTING FIDEL'S COHIBA

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Cuba lost half its GDP and its only ally. The lights were going out across the island. Two kids from Montreal walked off a Tupolev jet, bought a box of Cohibas from a stranger on the beach, and decided to keep them on.

For a decade beginning in the aftermath of Cuba's Período Especial, David Crouch and his partner Mathieu (Mat) Paquin built Texim - a Montreal-based electrical-equipment trader that became one of the most important foreign suppliers to the Cuban grid. They operated through the U.S. embargo, around the Cuban purchasing labyrinth, alongside the senior engineers who kept the country's transformers from exploding, and inside the rotating cast of international sponsors - Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan - that took turns underwriting the Cuban economy.

Lighting Fidel's Cohiba is the field memoir. A book about doing business in a country where the contracts were standard but the terms of survival were not. About the friendships, mostly with Cuban engineers, that made the business possible. About the apparatus that watched. About the moment when the music stopped. And about what it actually costs a foreign operator to live inside a country he does not own.

Entrepreneurship in frontier markets. Governance and finance under sanctions. Geopolitics from the operator's seat. A study in how capital really moves where it is not officially welcome - and what it costs the people who move it.

For founders, investors, students of frontier markets, and anyone with a beach chair, a long flight, and a curiosity about how modern Cuba actually works.

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DAVID M. CROUCH is a founder and senior advisor at Aediles Capital Inc., an independent sponsor and strategic advisor to corporations, institutions, entrepreneurs and boards across the energy and infrastructure sectors. From 2021 to 2026, Aediles originated and managed Chile's largest distributed-generation solar platform - 322 MW backed by a major global institutional investor. Over twenty-five years across Latin America and the Caribbean, he has originated, financed, and managed infrastructure investments and projects from Havana, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal, New York to Malta. Lighting Fidel's Cohiba is his first book.