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Promise Consulting [Luxury Blog] - Page 49

  • #Luxe, calme et volupté dans les palais dorés du millionnaire cubain Fidel Castro | #Cuba #FidelCastro #SegoleneRoyal

    ARTICLE PARU DANS LE JOURNAL LES OBSERVATEURS.CH, SUISSE, LE 05-12-2016

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    Fidel Castro, héros de la révolution marxiste latino-américaine, est mort depuis maintenant une semaine et sa dépouille croule sous les éloges funèbres dispensés par une pseudo-élite intellectuelle superficielle qui s’extasie devant les faux concepts humanistes du communisme international. Toujours les mêmes bobos conformistes de la pensée unique qui dispensent des bobards à longueur de temps et trompent énormément.

    Fidel Castro ne fut pas seulement un sanguinaire révolutionnaire, un dictateur féroce, un boucher pour les pauvres Cubains, un ennemi politique sans état d’âme, qui transforma, « l’île en une énorme prison entourée d’eau » selon les mots de sa propre sœur Juanita qui n’ira pas à son enterrement. Au nom d’une révolution des pauvres sensée libérer les prolétariens et apporter le bonheur à Cuba il en fit son domaine personnel pour son plus grand avantage et se maintenir au pouvoir. De révolutionnaire marxiste il devint millionnaire capitaliste tout en cultivant, pour le public et les médias complaisants, l’image idyllique du chef incorruptible et détaché des biens matériels : le pur des purs révolutionnaires qui en privé nage dans l’or pendant que son peuple meurt de faim.

    Selon le magasine Forbes, Fidel Castro faisait partie des hommes « les plus riches parmi les rois, les reines et les dictateurs. » La fortune de Castro est estimée à 900 millions de dollars dus en partie aux revenus d’une minière d’or et de nombreuses entreprises d’États sous son contrôle. Certains observateurs occidentaux et cubains expatriés parlent aussi d’une banque en Angleterre et de 270 entreprises de par le monde sous son emprise. On est bien loin des quelques pesos avec lesquels il se targuait de vivre, à l’instar de la majeur partie des Cubains.

    Yacht en bois rare, whisky de 12 ans d’âge, belles femmes, jacuzzi, étaient quelques unes des commodités que s’offrait le Lider maximo. Propriétaire d’une île paradisiaque proche de Cuba, Cayo Piedra, il aimait y recevoir des personnalités comme l’inhumain président de l’Allemagne de l’Est Erich Honecker qui décida de l’érection du mur de Berlin ou l’écrivain communiste Gabriel García Márquez.

    « Il laissait entendre que la révolution ne lui donnait aucun répit, aucun plaisir, qu’il ignorait et méprisait le concept bourgeois de vacances. Il mentait  » affirme un des ses anciens compagnons d’armes resté à ses côtés jusqu’en 1994, le lieutenant-colonel Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, réfugié ensuite à Miami et décédé mystérieusement après ses révélations sur le dictateur cubain parues dans un livre intitulé « Double vie de Fidel Castro ».

    « Il était convaincu que Cuba était sa propriété » écrit Sanchez. Outre la vie capitaliste, tant honnis en public mais si aimée en cachette, il aimait les femmes : il eut plusieurs épouses, plusieurs maîtresses et huit enfants qui tout comme lui aiment la vie luxueuse. Le colonel Sanchez raconte : « Pendant que son peuple mourrait de faim Fidel Castro a vécu avec toutes les commodités. Et cela est vrai aussi pour ses huit enfants, les diverses épouses et amantes. Le tout dans le plus grand secret ».

     

  • #Luxury #Shoppers Crowd #London for #Brexit bargains [@adetem @LuxuryDaily]

    NOVEMBER, 30, 2016.

    London: While the prospect of Brexit is weighing on much of the British economy, tourism and luxury goods businesses are cashing in on bargain-hungry visitors lured by the slide in the pound.

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    London’s tourism agency says sales of goods eligible for sales-tax exemption have gone up by a third since the Brexit vote in June, which sent the pound sterling plunging against the euro and dollar. ”We calculated that over the last four months it’s been about 12% cheaper for Europeans to come and shop here,” said Chris Gottlieb, head of leisure marketing at the agency London & Partners. The pound is now at 1.17 euros compared with 1.3 euros before the shock vote to leave the European Union, while it has also fallen to US$1.25 from US$1.49. The result is that London has become the cheapest city for luxury goods shopping in the world in dollar terms, according to a study by Deloitte.

    ‘GOING TO SPEND MUCH MORE’

    In tourist areas, the effects are evident. ”We’re going to spend much more money than we planned to,” said Radostina Nonova, a Bulgarian tourist, laughing as she lugged her bags on Carnaby Street - in the heart of London’s shopping district. ”We didn’t plan to shop too much but it’s obvious that the prices are very good for us. ”So we shop and we can afford to eat and drink outside. That was not possible years ago,” she said.

    French tourist Christophe Disic said he did not come just because the pound was low but “when we changed our money we realised we had a few more pounds for fewer euros”. When speaking to US tourists, shopkeepers are quick to take out their calculators. ”We’re an American brand. Our products are designed and assembled in the States. But with the weakening of the pound it actually happens to be cheaper for the American tourists to buy an American product in London,” said Denis Sagajevs, who works in Shinola, a shop selling watches and leather accessories. ”It’s affected by the fact that they can claim VAT on their way back. We pretty much on a day-to-day basis explain that to customers from the States. It happens to be quite a strong sales driver,” he said.

    50 PER CENT INCREASE IN SHOPPERS

    Some shops are adapting their advertising and sales tactics to the new consumer behaviour. ”Before the vote, European tourists were couples who came to be together and maybe bought a couple of things,” said James, the manager of a luxury men’s clothes shop on Carnaby Street. ”Now, there are groups of friends who rush in. They grab everything they can carry.” James estimated that European and US shoppers coming to his store have increased by around 50%. Instead of spending on costly advertising in British newspapers as it did before, his firm is changing tactic to appeal more to overseas visitors. They have put up signs outside Underground train stations near the shop.

    But there are doubts about how long the boom can last. While the good health of the British economy was confirmed by solid growth of 0.5% in the third quarter, the official forecasts for 2017 have been lowered to 1.4% from 2.2%. ”Our British customer sales are not as strong as before the vote and we don’t even know if this tourism boom is going to last,” James said. - AFP

  • Inside #Fidel #Castro’s life of #luxury and ladies while country starved [#cuba @adetem]

    castro, new-york post, cuba

    FROM THE NEW YORK POST, BY LAURA ITALIANO, NOVEMBER, 27, 2016

    With his shaggy beard and rumpled, olive-drab fatigues, Fidel Castro presented himself to the world as a modest man of the people. At times, he claimed he made just 900 pesos ($43) a month and lived in a “fisherman’s hut” somewhere on the beach.

    But Castro’s public image was a carefully crafted myth, more fiction than fact.

    “While his people suffered, Fidel Castro lived in comfort — keeping everything, including his eight children, his many mistresses, even his wife, a secret,” wrote Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Castro’s longtime bodyguard. Sanchez’s book, “The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Líder Maximo,” describes his former boss’s hidden life of political ruthlessness, mistresses and greed.

    Castro, who died Friday night at 90, made a personal fortune offering safe haven to drug traffickers, bedded a bevy of women over the decades, and once threatened his own brother, Raul, with execution when the brother lapsed into alcoholism in the ’90s, Sanchez’s book reveals.

    Amazingly, most Cubans had no idea how, or even where, their secretive strongman actually lived. Even his first and second wives were kept out of the public eye — as was their leader’s two-timing. Castro cheated on his first wife, the upper-middle-class Mirta Diaz-Balart, with Natalia Revuelta. “With her green eyes, her perfect face and her natural charm,” Revuelta was one of Havana’s most beautiful women, Sanchez wrote — no matter that she, too, was married at the start of their mid-’50s affair. Diaz-Balart would bear Castro his first “official” son, Fidel Jr. or “Fidelito,” and Revuelta would bear Castro his only daughter, Alina.

    Castro cheated, too, on his second wife, seducing “comrade Celia Sanchez, his private secretary, confidante and guard dog for 30 or so years,” Sanchez wrote. Castro also bedded his English interpreter, his French interpreter, and a Cuban airline stewardess who attended him on foreign trips, Sanchez wrote. “He doubtless had other relationships that I did not know about,” Sanchez wrote. Castro kept 20 luxurious properties throughout the Caribbean nation, including his own island, accessed via a yacht decorated entirely in exotic wood imported from Angola, Sanchez wrote. Taking control of Cuba on New Year’s Day 1959, after his guerrilla army routed the quarter-century-long dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Castro vowed that unlike his hated predecessor, he’d share the nation’s wealth with its poorest citizens.

    But while he made good on some of his promises to educate and care for his people — building free schools and hospitals with the help of his Soviet sponsors — Castro’s legacy was also one of repression and hypocrisy. Deep poverty persisted — teen prostitution, crumbling houses, food rations. Political opponents were executed by the thousands by firing squad, or sentenced to decades of hard labor. Castro had as many as 11 children with four women — only two of whom he was married to — and numerous other mistresses, Sanchez wrote.

    Only those closest to him knew of these affairs. The only woman who dared to cause him any public scandal was his rebellious daughter, Alina Fernandez Revuelta. “I remember her in the 1980s, a pretty young woman who had become a model,” Sanchez wrote. “One day, when I was in Fidel’s anteroom, Pepín Naranjo, his aide-de-camp, showed up with a copy of the magazine Cuba. “Spread across its second page, Alina could be admired posing on a sailboat in a bikini, in an advertisement for Havana Club rum.” “What on earth is this?” Fidel exclaimed, according to Sanchez. “Call Alina, at once!”

    What followed was an epic father-daughter blowout.

    "Two hours later, Alina strode into his office, not in the least ­intimidated,” Sanchez recalled. “The ensuing argument was the most memorable of them all: Shouting reverberated all over the room, shaking the walls of the presidential office.” “Everybody knows you are my daughter! Posing in a bikini like that is unseemly!” Castro raged. Several years later, in 1993, Fidel learned through his secret service that Alina was plotting to flee to the United States.

    “I am warning you: Alina must not leave Cuba under any pretext or in any way,” Castro told his head bodyguard, Col. Jose Delgado Castro, according to Sanchez. “You’ve been warned.” Two months later, Alina put on a wig, packed a false Spanish passport, and, with the help of a network of international accomplices, sneaked out of Cuba. This, too, ignited the dictator’s temper. “One rarely sees the Comandante allowing his anger to explode,” Sanchez wrote. “In 17 years, I saw it only twice. But when Pepín broke the unpleasant news to him that day, Fidel went mad with rage. “Standing up, he stamped his feet on the ground while pointing his two index fingers down to his toes and waving them around.” “What a band of incompetent fools!” he cried. “I want those responsible! I demand a report! I want to know how all this could have happened!”

    Alina remains one of her father’s most outspoken opponents. “When people tell me he’s a dictator, I tell them that’s not the right word,” she told the Miami Herald. “Strictly speaking, Fidel is a tyrant.” Castro’s second wife and widow, Dalia Soto del Valle, is the least known of Castro’s women, Sanchez noted. They met in 1961. Castro noticed her in the audience as he gave an open-air speech, Sanchez remembered.

    “Fidel spotted in the first row a gorgeous girl with whom he rapidly started exchanging furtive and meaningful glances,” Sanchez wrote. After being vetted by his aide-de-camp, del Valle was installed in a discreet house just outside Havana. Eventually, they married and had five sons, who grew up in hidden luxury on an estate outside Havana. “With its orange, lemon, mandarin, grapefruit and banana trees, the estate resembled a veritable garden of Eden — especially if one compared it with the notorious ration book that all Cubans had to use to buy food,” Sanchez wrote.

    Each member of the family possessed his or her own cow, “so as to satisfy each one’s individual taste, since the acidity and creaminess of fresh milk varies from one cow to another.” Disloyalty exacted a heavy price. Dissidents were jailed for as little as handing out books on democracy. Castro himself displayed little loyalty, either professionally or personally. Even his closest aides faced execution if it suited his agenda. In the late ’80s, when an international scandal brewed over Castro’s exchanges of safe haven for cash with Colombian cocaine traffickers, Castro had no problem throwing those closest to him under the bus. “Very simply, a huge drug-trafficking transaction was being carried out at the highest echelons of the state,” Sanchez wrote.Castro “was directing illegal operations like a real godfather,” Sanchez wrote.Revolutionary Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, who had fought alongside Fidel and Raul Castro, was at the center of the drug dealings, Sanchez said.

    But when the US caught wind, Castro vowed an “official inquiry.” Raul was forced to watch on closed-circuit TV as a kangaroo court tried and convicted Ochoa — and then to watch the general’s execution by firing squad. “Castro made us watch it,” Sanchez recalled. “That’s what the Comandante was capable of to keep his power: not just of killing but also of humiliating and reducing to nothing men who had served him devotedly.” After Ochoa’s death, Raul plunged into alcoholism, drowning his grief and humiliation with vodka. “Listen, I’m talking to you as a brother,” Castro warned him. “Swear to me that you will come out of this lamentable state and I promise you nothing will happen to you.” Raul, who perhaps knew best what his brother was capable of, complied.

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  • [@pointsdevente]- Face à la crise, quelle posture pour les marques de luxe françaises ? [@adetem @luxurysociety]

    Quelle est la meilleure attitude à adopter pour les marques luxe françaises ?

    Propos recueillis par Cécile Buffard

    [Philippe Jourdan]. Elles possèdent de solides atouts. On ne construit pas une marque de luxe en quelques années. Les acteurs mythiques ont construit leur image, leur activité, leur savoir-faire et leur position sur un temps long. Après, ce n'est pas parce qu'on dispose d'un temps long qu'on ne peut pas le bousculer.

    Oui, il y a une élégance à la française, une vision de la femme française qui plaît avec une vraie tradition de savoir-faire. Ce qui est compliqué, c'est que nous ne sommes pas les seuls acteurs. Je crois beaucoup aux marques italiennes même si on a longtemps cru que l'Italie resterait l'atelier de nos marques de mode.

    De la même façon, il existe aux États-Unis de très nombreuses marques de luxe dont certaines ne servent que les clientèles américaine et anglosaxonne et qui sont de vraies concurrentes aux marques françaises. D'une façon générale, on ne développe pas de la même façon un secteur qui affiche 1 % de croissance au lieu de 5 %. Mais si le marché est compliqué, je ne crois pas à la mort du luxe. Ce n'est pas pour rien que dans toutes les civilisations, on a consacré autant de dépenses, d'énergie, et de ressources dans l'économie du luxe. Quel que soit le contexte, le luxe est intemporel. 

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  • [@pointsdevente]- Faut-il céder à la tentation du #masstige ? [@adetem @luxurysociety][Philippe Jourdan]. Si l'idée est de substituer au prestige le masstige parce que le ralentissement de l'économie oblige les actionnaires à maintenir ou à aller chercher

    Faut-il céder à la tentation du masstige, à mi-chemin entre mass market et prestige?

    Propos recueillis par Cécile Buffard pour Points de Vente

    [Philippe Jourdan]. Si l'idée est de substituer au prestige le masstige parce que le ralentissement de l'économie oblige les actionnaires à maintenir ou à aller chercher des volumes dans une confusion des genres, je réponds non. En revanche, certaines marques du mass peuvent adopter temporairement les codes du luxe. C'est une stratégie qui plaît beaucoup aux jeunes clientes, adeptes du mix and match. Reste, toutefois, la question du futur. Quand, dans vingt ans, les Millennials auront grandi, préféreront-ils toujours le masstige au prestige? Il faut, également, démystifier la recette du masstige qui consiste à fabriquer des copies des modèles de la haute couture avec des matières premières et un savoir-faire de moindre qualité. Sur ce sujet, je serai plus sévère que Coco Chanel qui disait se moquer de la copie. Quand on s'approprie les codes d'une marque, dans le secteur de la santé on appelle ça un générique, dans la mode c'est une contrefaçon.

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  • [@pointsdevente] - Le premium est-il un concurrent du #luxe ? [@adetem @luxurysociety]

    Le premium est-il un concurrent du luxe?

    Propos recueillis par Cécile Buffard

    [Philippe Jourdan]. Cela peut être un mot fourre-tout pour cacher la volonté des acteurs du mass market de vouloir s'élever - en vain - vers le luxe. Cela dit, certaines marques ont su créer des phénomènes de collections, collaborer avec des personnalités et, au final, produire de la rareté, de l'exclusivité et une créativité forte sur quelques pièces. Elles se sont revendiquées premium car elles ont mis les pieds dans le luxe, soit par la qualité des matières, soit par le choix d'un créateur artistique, une communication bien faite et une commercialisation de niche ou limitée dans le temps. Les retombées en termes d'image sinon économiques de ces opérations sont toujours alléchantes. Ce qui explique le nombre de collections capsules qui émergent sur le marché.

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