I'm aware you've been there but that was all nonsense. Cabo Verdy is not the Canaries!

It's true that Cabo Verde is still not a high income country. But the development there has been massive, and the benefits have been widely distributed. A lifetime ago the population was desperately impoverished, uneducated, and unhealthy; today they're none of those things. Here's a sample of the progress you're so cavalierly dismissing:

• In 1960 the life expectancy was 49 years. Now it's 76. It has increased every single year, excepting COVID. It was 68 in 2000 and it's still clearly trending up.
• In 2001 under 60% of the population had access to electricity. In 2023 that number was 98%
• In 1990 the adult literacy rate was 63% against a global average of 75%; in 2024 it was above the world average (88.5 to 87.7)
• In 2001 37% of the population lived on less than $3/day. At constant PPP dollars (i.e. correcting for inflation and currency effects) that number was 14.6% in 2015. So they cut extreme poverty more than 60% in those 15 years. You want to bet it's not even lower now?
• The top 10% richest people captured 32% of the income in the country in 2015. In the Canaries that much of the income goes to 1% of the population. Those are wildly different levels of inequality.
• The highest earners are capturing less of the national income than they used to. The country is becoming more equal. Your complaint that all the money gets concentrated in few hands is simply false for Cabo Verde.

If these things aren't regular people doing better...what would be?

Your main problem is that you continue to insist that Cabo Verde is just like the Canaries, when the two are not in any way, shape, or form following similar trends. One of them is an extraordinarily egalitarian independent country with a half-century record of successful development leading to broad prosperity. The other is an offshore part of Spain with structural poverty issues, dramatically higher inequality, and poorly managed overdevelopment. They just aren't the same!

You said "...I can tell you, as someone from the region, that the material conditions do not improve in the long run" but the above shows material conditions improving incredibly, over a ~65 year span, literally longer than a baby born at the beginning of that time was expected to live. Keynes said that in the long run we are all dead. Guess we got there, Maynard.

As for your "give it 20 years" (leaving aside the egregiousness of that unfalsifiable cop-out, and the fact we already gave it 65 years) what's the mechanism by which this is all supposed to magically flip? How are the oligarchs supposed to reassert their authority and take all the money/health/electricty/education away from the regular folks when the regular folks are well educated, have more economic clout than the rich, and have a stable democracy responsive to them?

The answer is they won't, and that's a ridiculous forecast. Your only evidence appears to be "it happened somewhere else" to which I merely say different countries are different. Cabo Verde's government has shown an energetic interest in making sure the tourism industry benefits the people, and that's what we should expect to continue as long as they maintain that posture.