Cuban is more translucent than transparent.

I've made shelters out of clear plastic tarps. My experience with them is that they work pretty good.

This past season I made a "Thoreau" style tent out of plastic "SOL emergency blankets". This style is often called a "Baker's Tent" or "Campfire Tent" because it's optimized to capture heat from a campfire that's built in front of it. As you can see in the photos, mine has a clear plastic front. This tent is very light, and when you have a campfire going it's very warm inside, even in below freezing temps.

I tried to take the "Super Shelter" concept that was shown on the "Dual Surviver" TV series and refine it a bit for lightweight backpacking (and my personal whim). I think that design concept has a lot of room for improvement and innovation. Mine was hacked together, but it proved the concept well beyond my expectations, and I believe it has a lot of promise. Plus, it is the same design that Thoreau described using

If there is an efficient way to dual purpose an item then we're all interested in that as a design concept, but even component based designs limit our choices to those designed for the system, and the ability to mix and match is highly desirable, which means integrated pack/shelter systems are not very desirable.

The best way to make a shelter integrate with a pack it to make it light and small. The only other way is to build the pack around the shelter, and that limits our choices of packs.