Lights out in Cuba
Not a part of Cuba, not Havanna or Santiago, but the whole nation.
It is important to note that the power was out Friday – well before Hurricane Oscar made landfall. The category 1 hurricane, exacerbating self-inflicted economic woes, may prove to be a real disaster for the people of the Caribbean island.
An October 19 New York Times article recalled Fidel Castro referring to Cuba’s oil-fired power plants as “prehistoric” back in 2006. They have not been modernized since. This unprecedented collapse of the electric grid has not surprised anyone in that country.
An October 18 Wall Street Journal story quoted Jorge Piñón, a Cuba and energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin: “The government just doesn’t have the cash to buy crude oil, diesel or even cooking gas. It doesn’t even have enough money to pay for fuel shipments, and that’s sparking what we are seeing today. It’s an immense cash crunch.”
The Journal also reports that fuel shipments from Venezuela, which shares Cuba’s authoritarian and Marxist tendencies, have declined in recent years among that country’s own economic woes.
The present Cuban regime has always been propped up by one communist dictatorship or another. The former Soviet Union gave fuel and other assistance for decades until its own collapse. When it did, in 1991, Professor Ada Ferrer reports in her book “Cuba, an American History,” that Cuban caloric intake declined by one-third – such was the scale of the crisis.
And, announced by our own intelligence community just this summer, the same communist People’s Republic of China that has been propping up North Korea for decades is now pursuing military bases in Cuba. Readers unfamiliar with the Cuban missile crisis might want to Google that one up. Past is prologue.
The current situation under the Marxists is so bad in Cuba that U.S. immigration data shows that more than 600,000 Cubans (or 6 percent of the island’s population) have immigrated to the U.S. in the last two years. While Border Czar, Kamala Harris talked about root causes of U.S. immigration. Given the size and impact of both Cuban and Venezuelan migration into our country, I think Marxism might be a root cause.
Cuba, of course, blames Donald Trump and the (pre-hurricane) weather for their woes. It sounds a lot like a pilot blaming yesterday’s wind for his lousy landing today.
Some problems are so big you can see them from space.
Satellite photos of Korea at night appear to show an island, not the peninsula that it is - such is the lack of electricity in the communist North and the abundance of it in the capitalist South. The two Koreas share culture, language, similar population numbers, and lack of natural resources; their only meaningful difference is in their governing systems.
South Korea and its embrace of capitalism has unleashed John Maynard Keynes’ animal spirits – and their economy flourishes and their lights are bright. North Korea and Cuba have embraced Marxism, and they sit in the dark – appearing to be water north of South Korea on a satellite image.
There seems to be a pattern here. Marxist dictatorships must require a lot of candles.
Not all governing systems work equally well and choices matter. Do we teach this in our required Wyoming public school economics? We should.