Cuba

[evrheel]

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5545470-venezuela-is-collapsing-and-dont-look-now-but-so-is-cuba/

Rolling blackouts. A worthless currency. A once-mighty industry on life support. Doctors, engineers and students leaving in droves in search of a future. That all sounds like Venezuela, but I’m talking about Cuba.


As Venezuela’s crisis deepens, another — quieter but just as dangerous — is unfolding just 90 miles from Florida. The drama may be smaller, but the danger is real. If Venezuela is wobbling, Cuba is starting to fall.


On Sept. 10, Cuba’s entire electrical grid failed, plunging nearly 10 million people into darkness. It was the island’s fourth nationwide blackout in less than a year. Even before that, much of the country was losing power for half the day. Officials blamed machinery; Cubans blamed the system.


The country’s energy network has become a patchwork of corroded plants and emergency repairs. Over the past 14 months, it has suffered a dozen nationwide outages. Years of neglect and the burning of high-sulfur crude have crippled its power stations. As U.S. sanctions tighten on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s ability to keep its ally supplied with oil has withered.

 

[donbosco]

Finally...the embargo bears fruit.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

I guess. Obviously you can't roll the dice twice but when they really do the studies I wonder what the most compelling argument will be on if that embargo policy was a good one. And maybe just as importantly, if it was inevitable during the height of the Cold war, when should have ended.

We can't really see all the positives yet because the Cuban government is still in place. The embargo did kind of create a status quo where we didn't try to invade Cuba and the Cuban people weren't facing a rebellion every 20 years.

On the negative side, Castro's government was never overthrown. There are compelling arguments to say that the embargo actually strengthened his hold on the country because he was able to point to the us as the big baddie. Generations of Cuban people were living worse lives than they could have. It triggered a few migration and humanitarian crisis in the US and plenty of people died in crummy rafts trying to get to florida.

As to when it should have ended, there are some pretty good candidates. Maybe once they realized Castro wasn't going to get overthrown in the next few years after the embargo was put in place. Maybe once Castro grew up and settled down and wasn't trying to export the Communist revolution to every country he could think of. Maybe once Castro died. Maybe tomorrow. What's the point anymore? Well the point for probably 40 years has been to get votes in a swing state but Florida isn't much of a swing state anymore.