Cuba's national electric grid collapses, leaving millions without power
Comments
g8oz
hnburnsy
Why isn't Canada helping out Cuba, would be a good way to poke the US in the eye.
pcf
Trudeau PRAISED Castro when he died, along with many other state leaders. Canada is one of the most duped countries when it comes to believing The Socialist Fairytale™.
jjmarr
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DivingForGold
Cubans have horses and depend on then a lot. Why not have horses or oxen running around in a circle or the method in this video for powering a generator or alternator ?
dandelany
Maybe in a pinch, doesn't seem very sustainable. A single decent 400 watt solar panel produces about the same continuous power as a horse, and doesn't consume 20 lbs of hay per day, or pee on your generator.
schumpeter
Having family in Cuba, I guess this could work, but it doesn’t scale, because someone will inevitably steal your horses for dinner, when you aren’t looking.
dzonga
Cuba should've learned from China.
Communism with Cuban characteristics.
Then got energy independent-- by importing a lot of solar panels, wind turbines from China.
then they wouldn't be suffering an energy embargo from the US.
for the few cases they need hydrocarbons import from Russia.
xp84
China first got a lot of money by exporting billions (trillions?) of dollars of stuff to the whole world with their huge labor force (and presumably a lot of raw materials either homemade or imported). Cuba doesn’t have that ability.
An alternative plan: Cuba could also, at any point, have given up on Communism and rejoin the rest of the world. Even China sold out a lot of its communist ideals if we’re being honest, which helped the West feel pretty okay doing business with them.
skeledrew
> Cuba could also, at any point, have given up on Communism
Why should they? If it wasn't for the decades of sabotage it would've been working for them reasonably. Should they succumb to the bullying from another country that hates their ideals?
poulpy123
And Cuba is a small island next to the US, not a massive juggernaut on the other side of the world
JohnnyLarue
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bitwize
"Communism can never work," says leader of country that routinely sabotages or outright overthrows communist governments.
rayiner
How is the U.S. "sabotaging" Cuba? The U.S. simply prevents capitalistic American companies from doing business with Cuba.
Regardless, the fact that communism doesn't work was proven decades ago by China's shift to authoritarian state-managed capitalism. Singapore, South Korea, and, ironically, Vietnam are other examples that show that model works really well at pulling third-world countries out of poverty.
skeledrew
> How is the U.S. "sabotaging" Cuba?
Is this for real? There has been a blockade on Cuba for decades. Any country that wants to do business with them is threatened, implicitly or explicitly. Look at how Venezuela, their primary supplier of oil, was recently invaded and taken over, and the shipments stopped.
craftkiller
> How is the U.S. "sabotaging" Cuba? The U.S. simply prevents capitalistic American companies from doing business with Cuba.
It is not just American companies. It is a blockade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Cuban_crisis
rayiner
You're pointing to the blockade of Venezuelan oil which just started. How does that explain the failure of Cuba to develop for the six decades before that?
craftkiller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
> companies that do business with the U.S. which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of U.S. sanctions. The U.S. has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba.
> The U.S. government has pursued extraterritorial measures to enforce its embargo. Cuban ambassador Ricardo Alarcón cited 27 recent cases of trade contracts interrupted by U.S. pressure to the U.N. in 1991. British Petroleum was seemingly dissuaded by U.S. authorities from investing in offshore oil exploration in Cuba despite initially expressing interest. In 1992, the U.S. State Department discouraged firms like Royal Dutch Shell and Clyde Petroleum from investing in Cuba.
MattDamonSpace
Could you imagine Cuba with the per capita GDP of Florida?
Geopolitical and sovereignty awkwardness aside (big aside I know)…. it’s obvious Cuba, and especially the average Cuban, would benefit immensely from the island becoming a US state, no?
xp84
In an alternate universe, instead of the Castro 1959 takeover, a pro-US faction took over and requested annexation, and was accepted, since 1950s Americans all would have thought it was cool to have another cool tropical island paradise state. The Hawaii of the east coast!
If anyone thinks Cuba is better off in any metric now than they would have been in that alternate reality, I’d love to hear why.
disgruntledphd2
> If anyone thinks Cuba is better off in any metric now than they would have been in that alternate reality, I’d love to hear why.
I mean, pre-Castro Cuba was basically a playground for the US rich. Like, the whole revolution was about kicking those people out.
Personally, I think that's morally justified, but I don't agree that what the US has done to them since then is morally justified. Obviously people differ on their opinions of this stuff, but collective punishment (which is what the US embargoes are) is generally regarded as a war crime.
TheAlchemist
Is this a serious question ?
Read this first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
Recently, the U.S. decided that Cuba can no longer import any oil, and they are enforcing that. Is this a surprise that the grid collapses in those circumstances ?
Communism is bad (I'm from Eastern Europe...), but this collapse has nothing to do with communism. It has everything to do, with the U.S. deciding unilaterally that Cuba needs to fall.
sQL_inject
"The main responsibility of every Soviet citizen was to facilitate the arrival of Communism, where people would contribute to society according to their abilities, and receive from society according to their needs -- has there ever been a nobler sounding goal? And yet historians cannot agree on an estimate of many millions of people were starved to death, tortured to death, or worked to death, all in the name of that goal."
PickledHotdog
And yet millions of people starve, are tortured and are worked to death in the name of Capitalism. How many die or are made destitute due to lack of affordable healthcare in the US alone?
Not to mention the trillions of dollars (and lives) given up in the pursuit of halting what we're told is a fragile, prone-to-collapse form of government for a hundred years now.
Strange that.
sQL_inject
I'm not sure where or by whom you you were told it's a fragile, prone-to-collapse form of government, but I wasn't. Communism has a stranglehold on the societies it spawns within because the elite keep it that way.
Show me a country that espouses true Communist principles and I'll show you ten successful Capitalist ones. Don't confuse corporatism with capitalism, the latter which is the free exchange of ideas and goods mutually beneficial to both parties in an open market.
The US's enemies keep Cuba on life support for one reason.
Work a day in the gulag for your pithy apple ration and you'll be begging to sit in an air conditioned office and choose from ten apple varieties at different prices at your local Corporate Grocer.
9864247888754
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lefrenchy
Am I crazy for thinking this is possibly a US cyber attack on the infrastructure to justify Trump's coming actions?
3eb7988a1663
Uhh yes? The country has been blockaded from receiving fuel. While there could be a more clever attack, the overt one is enough to do all of the damage.
SR2Z
The country has categorically not been blockaded. A blockade is an act of war where a country prevents all trade regardless of origin.
Cuba has been embargoed which prevents US owned businesses, as well as any businesses which operate in the US, from trading with it. An embargo is not an act of war, it's a way for market economies to apply economic pressure using their soft power. It's not enforced by the military away from the territory of the country placing the embargo and is instead enforced domestically using the police.
Large oil-producing countries that traded with Cuba include Venezuela, Russia (the USSR before 1990), China, and Iran. Market democracies are all pretty OK with the embargo, because trade with a country that doesn't recognize property rights is inherently fraught.
schumpeter
Technically the US did blockade Cuba from receiving oil, specifically from Venezuela. Blocking tankers, boarding them, and even confiscating them.
The embargo continues, as it has for decades, but the oil blockade is a real thing.
SR2Z
You make that sound like the US has been stopping Venezuelan tankers for decades.
It hasn't, that's a Trump special. Cuba's energy insecurity goes back a lot longer.
AlotOfReading
Of those countries, only China remains relatively unencumbered and they've limited exports for internal reasons. There were also a few other source countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Algeria. Algeria stopped years ago because of internal issues. Mexico and Brazil stopped after pressure from the US. That leaves Cuba's domestic production, which is limited to begin with and can't be refined in any sufficient quantity.
Use whatever word you want to use to describe the situation, but the practical result strongly resembles a blockade.
SR2Z
> Of those countries, only China remains relatively unencumbered and they've limited exports for internal reasons.
Yeah, only China remains unencumbered because only China didn't collapse under the weight of an absurd ideology and crushingly oppressive government. Thanks to Xi's heavyhanded interventions and reassertion of state control, they're trending the wrong way.
The USSR couldn't compete with the free world and collapsed. Venezuela had been shedding refugees for decades before Trump abducted the pro-Havana regime. Iran murdered 30,000 protestors in the streets before the US started bombing it. No matter how you slice it, Cuba had decades of steady imports from friendly nations and yet has remained poor and underdeveloped because of its economic model. No amount of trained doctors or public healthcare can compete with the fact that, until recently, it was illegal to start a business on the island.
If we rewind to 2015 before Trump ever took office, none of these were different. All of those countries were flimsy states and unreliable trading partners, and Cuba routinely dealt with famines and shortages. American pressure doesn't help, but even if the US hadn't embargoed Cuba when the revolution happened it would still have been forced to embargo it afterwards when the Cuban government started launching into its anti-US foreign interventions (there's a fascinating Wikipedia rabbit hole there, if you're bored).
I will use words to describe the situation that actually describe the situation. Cuba sucks at trade because it has been continuously alienating its largest neighbor and blocking domestic industry from forming since the revolution.
Mind you, the US even supported the Cuban Revolution against Batista (despite supporting him for decades). That lasted until the revolutionary government started seizing American holdings and executing landlords.
The history of the two countries is complicated and it does both of them a disservice to pretend like this is a black-and-white "evil imperialist US embargoes a fledgling, innocent socialist Republic."
JohnnyLarue
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aaron695
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The lawless bully nation known as the United States is strangling Cuba. They manufactured this crisis by threatening sanctions on anyone who sends oil to the country. An act of outrageous imperial aggression.