A Caribbean cripto-cyber-city
The environment is stunning: spectacular blue waters, gorgeous coral reefs, white sands and jungle trails. A Caribbean tropical paradise? Well, not really. At least not for everyone. Mass tourism has brought badly needed hard currency to Roatán, a mid-size Honduran island just off the coastal city of La Ceiba. An average of five giant cruise ships dock each day at the harbor unloading hundreds of mostly American vacationers: they linger around for about six hours, buy some T-shirts, eat fried fish, take a few selfies and leave.
This does not make Roatán any different from thousands of other tourist destinations in the Caribbean or elsewhere all over the world. What is unusual here is the presence of Próspera, a controversial ZEDE (Employment and Economic Development Zone) or – in the words of the US billionaires who are promoting it – “a private space of freedom, innovation, research and self-governance” based on the theory of “charter cities” developed by economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer but quickly transformed into a mechanism that allows private investors to administer territory, justice, and urban planning almost independently of the central government.
I was curious to see what it was all about, so I rented a car and headed there, driving on rough and winding roads through the island’s hills. I had already obtained the visitor permit online, so I had no trouble getting past the private security guards and meeting the “digital nomads” who run the place. Próspera is not yet a city, and I doubt it ever will be. For now, it consists of a 14-story tower (Duna Tower) used as a residence and co-working spaces, a robotic carpentry workshop and a Bitcoin Academy connected by shuttle to a luxury resort with a private beach, tennis courts, and an 18-hole golf course.
Nevertheless, investors are flocking. And it’s easy to see why: almost no taxes, business registration “in 6 clicks online”, private arbitration for disputes, cryptocurrency transactions, the opportunity for companies to adopt whatever foreign regulations they choose and to skip national rules and international protocols in fields such as bio-neurotechnology and gene therapy.
From the Duna Tower it’s a five minutes’ walk to Crawfish Rock, a few hundred people of mostly English-speaking Black Caribbean descent who live in raised, wood-slat homes on ancestral land. A land, they fear, that Próspera has set its sights on. The village is extremely poor, plagued with drugs and alcoholism. There is an elementary school without desks or books and a “pulperia” where fishermen buy fried bananas, Coca-Cola and beer.
Luisa Connor, the community leader, has been fighting Próspera since 2020. “The Americans bought the land without explaining what they were going to do with it. They deceived us. We will not leave here, and we will continue to fight”. But it will be an uphill struggle.
The ZEDE was established in the island with the agreement of the corrupt right-wing Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández who, after winning two rigged elections, was arrested, extradited to the US, sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and finally released from jail last December thanks to an astonishing federal pardon granted by Donald Trump.
When in 2022 Hernández’s successor, Xiomara Castro, repealed the law authorizing the ZEDE, Próspera responded with an international lawsuit worth $10 billion, equivalent to approximately 40% of the country’s GDP, claiming that Honduras violated its contractual obligations.
But now it will not be necessary to wait for a court verdict. Nasry Asfura, the newly elected president, has the full support of Uncle Donald and his billionaire associates in Silicon Valley, who dream to build a Caribbean Dubai on the sandy beaches of Roatán.
