 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
by Eric Jackson
|
|
|
|
|
by Eric Jackson
Ask any random and anonymous Puerto Rican, and you can never be sure what he or she will say that the smallest of the Greater Antilles is and ought to be. You may be told that Puerto Rico is a Latin American country, part of the USA, an American colony or a democratic commonwealth that's freely associated with the United States. Islanders are divided, roughly into three factions: a plurality who are disposed to continue the present commonwealth status that gives Puerto Ricans US citizenship and Puerto Rico its anomalous semi-autonomy; a large minority who want their homeland to become the 51st star on Old Glory; and a small minority who would prefer to be represented in the OAS as Latin America's newest independent sovereign state.
Ask any Panamanian pharmacist or physician, and his or her answer about what Puerto Rico is will be more predictable. As people in our health care sector know, Puerto Rico is a very important supplier of the medicines that Panama uses.
Last year, Puerto Rico sold about $64 million worth of goods and services to Panama, about 70 percent of it in the form of pharmaceutical exports. This total was down a bit from the previous year's $65 million business volume, but considering this country's economic woes, the slightly diminished gross sales may have actually meant a somewhat higher Puerto Rican percentage of Panama's imports.
"So far, we're holding our market share," opined Mayline Menéndez, the director of sales for Latin America and Florida for the Puerto Rico Convention Bureau. Her job is to develop Puerto Rico as a destination for tourists from Panama and the rest of the region, and especially to bring Latin American business and professional convention business to her island.
Menéndez said that while the great majority of Puerto Rico's convention business comes from the United States, that sector's growth is largely coming from Latin America. "We have seen a 59 percent growth in convention business from Latin America," she said. That's vital to the island's tourism economy, she pointed out: "We understand that the US market is not going to fill our hotel rooms all year long."
Her bureau's Latin American efforts have been most effective at attracting business and professional visitors from Mexico, followed by Brazil. Chileans and Panamanians are coming to Puerto Rico in increasing numbers, while economic and political troubles in Argentina and Venezuela have --- temporarily, Menéndez hopes --- meant fewer visits from those countries' citizens.
While Menéndez is mainly concerned with promoting a segment of Puerto Rico's important tourism industry throughout a large region, Zamia Marina Baerga, the executive director of Puerto Rico's commercial office on Avenida Balboa, is in charge of building across-the-board economic ties between her island and our isthmus.
We're a fairly good match. Panama has just under three million inhabitants, while Puerto Rico has a population of slightly less than four million. The dialects of Spanish spoken in the two places are similar. Both countries have close and complicated ties with the United States, which among other things have given both Spanish-speaking societies large English-speaking minorities and have left both places with large communities of American military veterans.
"You can't tell Panamanians from Puerto Ricans just by looking at them," Baerga noted. That can make her job a bit more difficult, because although she personally knows only a few dozen Puerto Ricans in this country, many, many more are inconspicuously woven into the fabric of Panamanian society. Bringing Panama's Puerto Rican community together now and then would develop interpersonal networks out of which the commercial ties that it's her job to promote could flourish. This year is the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Puerto Rico's commonwealth under the leadership of four-time governor Luis Muñoz Marín, and the event will be observed here.
If identifying Panama's Puerto Ricans is a task barely begun, the job of developing PR-RP business ties is well underway. Panama is the third-largest Latin American customer for Puerto Rican exports. According to Baerga, some 70 percent of those exports are pharmaceuticals, but she and the commonwealth she represents are working hard to diversify that trade. That was evident in the Puerto Rican EXPOCOMER display, in front of which The Panama News interviewed her and Menéndez. This year, five Puerto Rican businesses were plugging foods, plastic wares, plumbing fixtures and construction materials. Baerga said that her office is currently looking for Panamanian distributors for about two dozen Puerto Rican companies that want to sell their products here.
Menéndez, meanwhile, is concentrating her efforts on the service sector, but often with the aim of helping Baerga boost exports. By "facilitating all the other elements that are not part of the actual negotiations," Menéndez said, her bureau seeks to make it easier for importers and exporters. Acknowledging that sustainable economic ties must involve "two-way trade" and that globalization is changing the nature of the challenges that businesses everywhere are facing, she said that Puerto Rico's entrepreneurs are "preparing new ways to do business" and "opening the way into new industries."
Menéndez also talked about the changing face of tourism. "We can't just rely on beaches --- a lot of places have those," she said. "We want to promote the culture of tourism, but we're looking at other areas." One attraction that Puerto Rico is working on is the concept of "techno-tourism," that is, bringing in visitors who are looking for tropical sun and Caribbean beaches but want to maintain access to modern telecommunications and other technological advantages not found in less developed places.
Last year, Puerto Rico wasn't represented at EXPOCOMER, although in years prior to that the "Puerto Rico, USA" pavillion was among the annual trade fair's largest. That was largely due to a change in the governor's office (from a pro-statehood to a pro-commonwealth chief executive) and changes in the way EXPOCOMER was run. This year's Puerto Rican display was modest, but during our visit plenty of potential customers were making their inquiries there.
Amid the wanted disruptions of businesses checking out the offerings and international dignitaries offering their greetings, Menéndez was upbeat about the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico's new commercial initiatives. "We're doing something right," she said. "It's just going to take some time."
|
All Rights Reserved For information or problems with this page contact: editor@ThePanamaNews.com |
|
|
|
 |