You can't take flat land for granted, since it gets used up quickly. In one game, I laid out a site for an airport, which takes up a lot of real estate. Twenty years later my game was over and construction on the airport proper hadn't even begun because it was taking so long to hew out a flat area on the side of the hill. Tropico's economy relies on things happening in real time. To make money from cigars, for instance, people have to harvest tobacco.
Teamsters carry the tobacco to a cigar factory.
Factory workers turn the tobacco into cigars. Teamsters carry the cigars to the dock. You don't make money until your dockworkers load the cigars on a freighter. Since this is such a drawn out process, an entire year can pass without a supply of expensive cigars being delivered to the freighter. This can lead to a bouncing economy.