For the past two years, Martin, a jovial, near-retirement age, chain-smoking businessman from Slovakia, has been a nightly feature at the lobby bar of Havana's Occidental Miramar hotel. Martin-who declined to have his last name printed in a U.S. publication-has been shuttling between Havana and Caracas ever since the Cuban economy started booming two or three years ago and oil-rich Venezuela began spending billions of dollars on housing programs. Thanks to his efforts, he says, one of his Slovakian clients landed a contract with the Venezuelan government to build several hundred prefab homes for working-class families, and he's working hard to get a similar deal for that company in Cuba.

Why should we care?

If you could fly from SRQ to Havana, it wouldn't take much longer than to Tallahassee. And if you flew a straight line, it would take exactly the same time to get to Caracas as to Denver. The salesman from the landlocked country across the Atlantic Ocean wouldn't stand a chance if hotel lobbies in Caracas and Havana were swarming with homebuilders from the United States. Yet they aren't, because most businesspeople here perceive Cuba, Venezuela and the rest of the Caribbean Basin as if they were in a different galaxy, not at our doorstep.

Times are changing, though, and the big blind spot on our mental map is shrinking. A small but growing group of entrepreneurs has realized that Sarasota-Bradenton isn't a bad location at all to do business with Caribbean Basin countries.

For one, historical connections, like that between Florida cattle ranchers and the Cuban market, are being rediscovered. A more recent phenomenon is the people connection: the number of Sarasota-Manatee residents with Caribbean roots is now at about 10 percent, and growing fast. To many of them, doing business with their country is a natural.

But a growing number of U.S.-born businesspeople are getting the hang of it, too. One reason is that air connections are quite good. Nearby Tampa International Airport serves San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean hub, twice a day. Another Caribbean hub, Miami International Airport, is just a commuter hop away from SRQ.

Still auspiciously absent from Caribbean trade are the region's manufacturers, which is surprising given the existing infrastructure. Airports aside, there are two ports nearby with regular cargo connections to destinations throughout the Caribbean Basin. Port Manatee, for instance, offers scheduled runs to Mexico's Yucatan, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Venezuela, and port executives are at the forefront among U.S. ports of opening up shipping connections with Cuba.

To most local businesspeople, whose livelihood is tied to the region's red-hot real estate and construction-driven economy, these facts didn't matter a whole lot-until the market began to cool. As construction is slowing and prices are maxing out, local developers, brokers and builders are beginning to search for the next frontier. Michael Saunders & Company, for example, plans to open an office on Eleuthera, an island of the Bahamas. Owner Michael Saunders recently told the Wall Street Journal that her clients like to buy second homes in the Caribbean in their search for the pristine Florida that was lost a while ago.

To be sure, the Caribbean Basin is a hodgepodge of markets very different in size and character.

"If you look around the Caribbean region, a number of countries have done remarkably well on certain criteria," says Brian Meeks, director of the Centre for Caribbean Thought at the University of West Indies in Jamaica. "Just think about places such as Barbados, the smaller eastern Caribbean islands, the Cayman Islands. Trinidad and Tobago have done well, not because of some grand scheme but because of their petroleum wealth. But the story underground is far more complex than that. If you see beneath the surface, you see that poverty is still present, that unemployment is still extreme in many territories, and that nothing substantially has changed."

Although Washington seems to be mainly preoccupied with socialism versus free market rule these days, foreign investors in most Caribbean Basin countries are facing much more fundamental problems: The skin-deep reach of government; corruption and crime; the rule of drug mafias, gangs and quasi-feudal landlords; and the profound social divide with ensuing conflicts tearing apart countries such as Haiti, Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Colombia.

Not surprisingly, the majority of Sarasota-Manatee entrepreneurs choose to do business in the wealthier Caribbean islands and in stable Costa Rica. That will leave Martin and his Slovakian companies a little more time to do business in Venezuela and Cuba.

The Refugee Investor In a league of his own is Styrofoam prince turned junk bond king Kenneth Dart.