Has Cuba reached a tipping point?

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Batt Boy

Batt Boy

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Sandi, or some other well versed in the area, please educate around the past year or so in Cuba. Seems, from my limited translation skills, that Cuba may be reaching a tipping point.

After almost 7 decades of embargo combined with self inflicted wounds, it seems the industries, infrastructure and civil services are on the brink of catastrophe. Sewer, water, Energy, health and the continued brain drain of educated have taken their toll. CiberCuba: Cuba, Actualidad, Entretenimiento, Cultura, Deportes, Farándula y Opinión

Or is this all wrong, and they are hanging in there?
 
That website, ‘CiberCuba” exists in English: CiberCuba: Cuba, News, Entertainment, Culture, Sports, Celebrity Gossip and Opinion

It comes out of Spain and, according to a friend of mine whose work focuses on Cuba, does a credible job though not a scholarly one.

My news on Cuba tends to come by way of a source called Boz, short for James Bosworth, who is more of a clearing house on the island rather than a expert. I’ll ask my buddy if he can be specific though - I’m sure he has insight but I don’t think he’s been back to the island since before COVID.

From my standpoint it certainly looks like Cuba is in dire economic straits - planned power outages, long a fact of life in the countryside, are now regular in
 
Havana. Venezuela’s internal woes hurt Cuba energy wise to be sure.

There is now dissent on the Left to go with more Rightist criticism…and there has been protests for several years. The government and folks associated with it make up the well-off and most of them are white so there is also a growing sense of racial strife.

Will the government there fall? Doubtful, though it might untighten more of the rules on capitalist operations if Harris wins. A trump victory means hard times and continued oppression there I’d say,
 
I'll add here that when the Castro generation was aging they reached down and skipped a generation in tapping the next leaders so while that cadre is getting up in years they don't have octagenerians in many power roles but rather pretty dedicated and invested party players in their 50s and 60s running things. Canel, the "president" is 64 while Cruz, the Prime Minister is 61. All of the 'seconds' to that ruling class tend to be even younger, again, according to my friend.
 
There were some significant protests in Cuba back in March. For a while there, it looked like they may catch some traction, only for the government to come in and quash them with a rather heavy hand. Protestors were jailed or sent to exile; that included very light crimes of voicing protest on social media. The cuban intelligence services have helped quell protests in Nicaragua (2018) and Venezuela; they decided to apply some of their new tactics on their own population.

The Cuban economy is in terrible shape. Crumbling infrastructure, outdated marxist policies, concentrated economy, brain drain, corruption...you name it...they fill the entire bingo card. They have been the country that has clung most stubbornly to the Marxist principles of the 1960's. They now depend on tourism (mostly from Europe) and remittances as their big revenue streams. At the end of the Obama regime it looked like we may have been on a slow path to normalization (something I've always advocated...replace the embargo with good ol' capitalism), but Trump violently reversed the course in a nod to the Cuban-American vote in SoFla. Biden didn't dare change things back (he had designs on a re-election).

Many people in Latin America thought that there would be changes in Cuba when the Castro regime passed on. There was hope that you would see a shift, similar to what happened in Vietnam or Eastern Europe. They had lost their great benefactor in the Cold War (Russia) in the 90s, but Chavez came in and saved the day in the early 00's. As Venezuela's situation has deteriorated, the amount of help they receive from there has dwindled dramatically, but they have regained some geopolitical value as a pawn with Russia and to a lesser extent China. The new guy Miguel Diaz Canel has just followed the Castro line of thinking, a true believer if you will. He's a fun read on Twitter.
 
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