Cuba's Power Grid Collapses Again. And Then a Hurricane Hit (reuters.com) 104
"Millions of Cubans remained without power for a third day in a row Sunday," reports CNN, "after fresh attempts to restore electricity failed overnight and the power grid collapsed for the fourth time — all before the arrival of Hurricane Oscar."
A report from Reuters notes it was the fourth power grid failure in 48 hours. "On the forecast track, the center of Oscar is expected to continue moving across eastern Cuba tonight and Monday, then emerge off the northern coast of Cuba late Monday and cross the central Bahamas on Tuesday," the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The Communist-run government canceled school through Wednesday — a near unprecedented move in Cuba — citing the hurricane and the ongoing energy crisis...
Cuba had restored power to 160,000 clients in Havana just prior to the grid's Sunday collapse, giving some residents a glimmer of hope... Energy and mines minister Vicente de la O Levy told reporters earlier on Sunday he expected the grid to be fully functional by Monday or Tuesday but warned residents not to expect dramatic improvements.
It was not immediately clear how much the latest setback would delay the government's efforts.
A report from Reuters notes it was the fourth power grid failure in 48 hours. "On the forecast track, the center of Oscar is expected to continue moving across eastern Cuba tonight and Monday, then emerge off the northern coast of Cuba late Monday and cross the central Bahamas on Tuesday," the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The Communist-run government canceled school through Wednesday — a near unprecedented move in Cuba — citing the hurricane and the ongoing energy crisis...
Cuba had restored power to 160,000 clients in Havana just prior to the grid's Sunday collapse, giving some residents a glimmer of hope... Energy and mines minister Vicente de la O Levy told reporters earlier on Sunday he expected the grid to be fully functional by Monday or Tuesday but warned residents not to expect dramatic improvements.
It was not immediately clear how much the latest setback would delay the government's efforts.
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Re:They should have listened... (Score:4)
You know, you really should read some news other than that from Newsmaxx.
Capitalists *hate* competition (which multinationals have merged/bought out each other in the last two years?), and the idea that a non-capitalist society might succeed is HORRIBLE... it might give us pee-ons ideas.
The US hates Cuba for that reason, and because the USSR originally supported them. CLUE: the USSR hasn't existed in almost 30 years. But the US keeps up the blockade, because of the votes in Miami and elsewhere... from the members of the Mob that *owned* Havana from Prohibition until the Revolution, and their kids. Oh, and the kids of those who supported the brutal dictatorship of Batista. And the US sugar companies that don't want competition from Cuban sugar.
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>USSR hasn't existed in almost 30 years. But the US keeps up the blockade
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) never included Cuba. Cuba is an independent communist nation. Cuba was reliant on the USSR because communism on the island has never functioned in a self sustaining manner.
- Cuban communists took from the private sector until it collapsed. (no new power plants, cars, farming equipment, infrastructure...)
- Cuban communists took from the people until they collapsed. (start with the ric
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And yet, this isn't the case for places like Vietnam or China. They have electric grids that work, but Cuba is the country stuck with sanctions and so feels like a time capsule. Mostly because of Florida which has a large number of Cuban expats and their descendants willling to vote for the party that votes to renew sanctions. Frankly the politics here is stupid, but that's a redundant statement.
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As a embargoed country, is Cuba entitled to humanitarian relief?
If so, will a certain country get pissy, when Cuba gets foreign aid?
Re:Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
As a embargoed country, is Cuba entitled to humanitarian relief?
Yes
If so, will a certain country get pissy, when Cuba gets foreign aid?
Nope.
In fact, the USoA will probably offer to cooperate.
If the Cuban Govt. will accept aid from the USoA or not, it remains to be seen.
99% sure the Aid will be rejected if it is done through the military, like the US Army Core of engineers, of hospital ships from the US Navy, or similar things...
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*Corps of Engineers.
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At least he went phonetic instead of going with the popular alternative pronunciation which describes a dead body.
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Russia is currently taking aid from North Korea... I'm not sure how much of a help they could be even if they wanted to.
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If one volunteers to fight for Russia, they are likely to fast track the relocation requests. If one survives that is.
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Whole lot of lessons never learned is what any country gets for being friends with Communism.
FTFY.
There are 100 million dead citizens that lay under the boot of 20th Century Communism. How many more will die in this century before we fucking learn? We act as if Chinas claim of less than 5,500 total COVID deaths is some kind of sign that Communism is improving.
According to the Black Book of Communism, communist governments killed 94 million people during the 20th century. According to the Black Book of Capitalism, capitalism killed 100 million people during the same period so the scores are pretty much equal, if anything capitalism ekes out a victory. You should be celebrating.
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That's why I'm moving my family to North Korea as soon as they approve our visas. We want a higher standard of living.
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Everything needs to use a banana for comparisons. That's what Americans understand. How many banana calories are being lost due to this outage?
no riots? (Score:2)
why haven't they rioted yet? The police state must be quite strong still.
Re:no riots? (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand, the only people that leave the country when a hurricane hits is Rafael Ted Cruz.
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He just needed to be able to properly coordinate for disaster relief from a safe, preferably resort, location.
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You really should read this. https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]
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why haven't they rioted yet? The police state must be quite strong still.
That's mostly a US thing [cnn.com]
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Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Interesting)
Even China long ago realized that pure Communism was not a route to success [ft.com]
Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership’s unwillingness to decisively implement a market-oriented reform programme despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo, the people said.
You would think that maybe a close pal like, idk, Venezuela, would at least be able to help with the fuel problem. Except oil production there significantly collapsed under Hugo Chavez [forbes.com].
It's taken a bit longer than the Soviet Union, but communism in Latin America may be reaching its point of collapse as well.
Re: Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:2)
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Surely the 66 years of embargo had nothing to do with it.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:4, Interesting)
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They chose communism. They wanted to help destroy the West. Oh gosh, the US wouldn't trade with them. Can't imagine why?
Now they're fucked. Where is the world's smallest violin? Oh that's right, I stored it next to my giant bucket of common sense and my bookshelf of history books that explains these things.
Next up, you'll do what? Blame Trump?
Castro fucked Cuba. They're still fucked. Because of Castro. 100% because of Castro. Post-Castro they continue to follow Castro policies. They are still fuc
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Oil production severely collapsed after US started sanctioning Venezuela, such that they could no longer invest money back into their oil sector. Not just the US sanctioned Venezuela but other countries like the UK who basically stole billions of USD that Venezuela had deposited into their accounts. All of this was frozen, and therefore no more maintenance could be done.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil production severely collapsed after US started sanctioning Venezuela, such that they could no longer invest money back into their oil sector.
That's the most nonsensical circular reasoning I've heard in a while. And today I watched some political ads.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:4, Interesting)
Oil production severely collapsed after US started sanctioning Venezuela, such that they could no longer invest money back into their oil sector.
That's the most nonsensical circular reasoning I've heard in a while. And today I watched some political ads.
When US sanctions went in it limited what Venezuela could do in regards to banking and using US dollars (erm... this is exactly what sanctions are meant to do). So was almost literally a case of Chavez having money but not being able to buy anything with it.
It's a gross oversimplification, there are many other factors to the collapse of their oil sector, not the least of which would be the loss of skilled personnel, a skilled oil worker could easily get a job anywhere else in Latin America, if they speak English, Europe and North America opens up as well.
Knowing a few Venezuelans in Colombia, I'm definitely no defender of the Maduro (Presidente Bobo) regime or Chavistas. The sanctions are doing exactly what they're meant to, sadly for the Vennies, Maduro controls the military, so controls the country with enough useful idiots still supporting him in the general population.
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For once sanctions actually had the intended effect.
Why do you think sanctions were imposed in the first place? Was it random? Just the US waking up one morning and deciding to fuck a random country? Why oh why oh why....? It's a mystery.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:4, Insightful)
If communism really is the problem then why doesn't the US lift the sanctions and just let it fail on its own? Then the whole world would be in no doubt about how terrible the Cuban system is, even when given every opportunity to succeed.
Claims that it is all due to communism are somewhat undermined when you have your finger tipping the scale.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Insightful)
and that's putting it kindly.
Why not let Communism succeed or fail on its own merits, then learn something from it to improve our own system? And if it fails, where is the compassion?
People love to look at the world as a handful of political enemies rather than billions of vulnerable people.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Insightful)
Paranoia over socialism in the US hurts a lot of Americans too.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are you talking about China or Russia?
Because neither are communist.
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Not really. Various versions of Marxism *predicted* that there would be communist revolutions everywhere. Some shit disturbers proposed that it was the duty of a good communist to help it along, but except for the most extreme everyone else was just supposed to pick the clearly superior system by looking at the good examples. The US used exactly the same strategy against communist states, for example inventing the supermarket and demonstrating how wonderful and abundant capitalism was.
The USSR itself pretty
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Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:4, Interesting)
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Obama lifted sanctions and Trump put them back. Because apparently communism is still scary to republicans.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:4, Insightful)
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While just about every form of economy deserves to be vilified in some way, communism itself isn't the problem. It's the leadership structure that emerges that imposes a so-called communism. It's not very communal to have a dictator, for example. Having corrupt people in power and an elite class that doesn't live at the level of the "commune" is not part of communism as an idealized concept either. These are just the types of people that would put something like this into effect and call it communism.
Th
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Its a tired but true statement that True Communism has never really been achieved, they've stopped at the stage where there is a dictator and never moved past that. There is supposed to be a final stage where government does not exist. Getting there seems like you need the philosopher king that has perfect knowledge, perfect prediction capabilities, perfect wisdom, and absolute power. Its like hoping to find a true maxwell's daemon. I think there are
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When you were in school I assume you worked hard and got good grades.
And the kids who fucked around smoking behind the bleachers instead of working hard got bad grades.
Did you ever consider going to the teacher and asking to have your grades averaged out with the losers who didn't work? Of course you didn't. That's communism in a nut shell. Take from productive people and share equally with lazy people. Destroy incentive to work hard or do better because no matter how hard you work you won't do any bett
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Destroy incentive to work hard or do better because no matter how hard you work you won't do any better than those losers smoking out.
Buddy, this isn't the 1950s anymore. Working hard doesn't get you shit unless you're already wealthy. A few people like Mark Cuban have lucked out but the number of everyday people getting rich enough to stop working is pretty low. In fact a millionaire recently tried the experiment of starting over from scratch. He eventually had to stop because of failing health. https://www.ladbible.com/lifes... [ladbible.com]
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That's not really communism, though maybe it's how some communist countries acted. Communism at the heart is that workers control the means of productions - you don't work hard so that your bosses decide to pay you or not, you work hard because you're a co-owner. Ideally, the hard workers in a cooperative force the lazy bums to get off their asses.
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Most of the causes of the communist country's governance comes from them forming through a violent civil war. So there's a big tendancy to continuea more militaristic governance at the start, because a sizeable portion of the population is opposed. The same thing happens the other way too, as in the Fascists winning in Spain or parts of South America and keeping a tight control over the population. Ie, start off life as authoritarian and it becomes hard to change, so you could say that communism as define
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Communism is, hopefully, scary to everybody regardless of political affiliation.
What scares you about the various communist countries today? Cuba and Vietnam aren't exactly keeping me up at night.
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Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Insightful)
Because scratching the surface of a so-called socialism and communism usually reveals a plain, boring, malignant, old-fashioned dictatorship/oligarchy. And more successful/enlightened/wealthy societies are totally within their rights to isolate from that toxicity.
Because socialism and communism are a bit like parasites or tumors - they can extend their lives by sucking resources from healthier societies and economies. And, what does an organism do when it detects that it’s been parasitized? It attempts to isolate and reject the parasite.
Socialisms and communisms are also a bit like viruses. They spread, and can only thrive by tearing down and consuming other organisms. Russia is the most obvious example of this, trying to forcibly spread their system.
Many socialisms and communisms behave like scavengers as well. They prey on their weaker marginal neighbors, and do their best to weaken the stronger ones before pouncing.
I’m not ignorant of history. The US has been predatory and expansionist, but that’s in the past. We’re no longer trying to expand our borders. Bush was the last US president who was big on forcibly spreading democracy at gunpoint. While I happen to believe our system is quantifiably superior, thank god we’re past that neo-conservative bs. But we’re under no obligation to sit still while Russia, China, North Korea and Iran work together to knock over other countries.
I’m also aware that socialism has some truly useful ideas, mixed in with a ton of worthless crap. Our society has already ripped out the good pages, implemented them, and tossed the rest of the mess in the trash. Hello social security, a nationalized military, federal taxation, medicaid, and other good stuff. But there’s a huge difference between a full-blown socialism like cuba, which is a flaming dumpster fire, and a few good socialist policies grafted onto a healthy democratic capitalism, which would be the US.
There;s something in this post to make everyone angry. Downmod incoming.
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You should come to Europe and see how socialism works.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Interesting)
Democracy and capitalism are like meat, vegetables and potatoes. That’s what makes a healthy meal.
Socialism is like black pepper. A little bit on top can improve things, but a little goes a long way. And only an idiot tries to make a full meal from black pepper only.
And communism is like arsenic. It isn’t on the menu at all unless a society is straight-up murderous or suicidal.
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe isn’t socialist. It’s democratic and capitalist, with a bit of the best socialist ideas grafted onto the side.
The difficulty is that different people use vastly different definitions of what socialism is.
I've always gone with the purely economic definition, but if you go with a definition of the government providing social services to the population-- and this is a lot of what what actual socialists were about in the late 19th and early 20th century--yes, you could call much of Europe socialist.
Also, keep in mind that not all socialism is Marxism. Contemporary Europe very much follows the Fabian model of socialism, and not at all following the Marxist model.
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If that wasn't their point, then they wooshed themselves.
And no - communism as an economic structure has likely never existed in the modern world, so we can't really say that. It's used as a name for a corrupt thing that gives money to elites in power while keeping everyone else equally poor.
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communism as an economic structure has likely never existed in the modern world
It certainly has existed and in fact does exist now, for example in kubbutzim. Communism actually works pretty well, but only in very small communities with extremely high social cohesion, where hard work and innovation can be rewarded directly through social recognition without the need to intermediate that recognition through money. it just doesn't scale beyond a couple of hundred people because for it to work everyone literally needs to know and respect, if not necessarily like, everyone else.
I suppos
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If we're going to the microcosm level then I'm sure there are many households that function this way internally. But at least you understand my point which is that seemingly nobody knows what communism actually is.
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This is the old canard about "communism is great but only if someone would do it right! Let's keep trying!"... 100 million deaths and unending misery later.
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No, communism is probably just impossible with a large group the size of a nation. But anything that is attempted is almost certainly not actually communism. Or even actually trying to be. The important thing is that we put our focus on the actual problems, so we don't waste time talking about the wrong things.
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There are multiple social democracies in Europe.
The problem Americans have understanding this is that in Europe socialism is much more than an economic system. Those countries are capitalist, but for example the government might own much of the stock market, or negotiate on behalf of workers. Healthcare is almost universality socialist in Europe.
European democracies are often socialist as well, with distributed power structures and strict limits on corporate participation and the role of money.
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In a similar vein, i keep telling my friends in the UK and The Netherlands that they better pray the US never goes universal healthcare. Because the ridiculous costs US citizens pay that funds the drug corporations allows them to offset the lower costs there. If that goes away, prices will rise across the board.
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If communism really is the problem then why doesn't the US lift the sanctions and just let it fail on its own? Then the whole world would be in no doubt about how terrible the Cuban system is, even when given every opportunity to succeed.
Claims that it is all due to communism are somewhat undermined when you have your finger tipping the scale.
Because it's mired in politics. I honestly think the sanctions have done more to keep Communism on life support in Cuba than anything else.
When the revolution came to Cuba, a lot of land and money owned by Americans were seized and loads of migrants fled Cuba to the US who again, owned land and had other money tied up, so for the last 60 odd years compensation has been a huge sticking point with the Cubans who fled to the US. Look at how red Florida turned in the 2000s on just the insinuation that the US
Re:Abject Failure of the Cuban Government (Score:5, Interesting)
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This was also Stalin who insisted that USSR be the chief of all international communism. Which is precisely where George Orwell (a socialist) came up with the "more equal than others" line.
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Because - Communism in the ideological sense isnt really the problem. It was part of the threat of Soviet Expansionism during the cold war but the real issue with Cuba is the revolutionaries appropriated a lot of property of US nationals.
The issue is THEFT
The current Cuban regime MUST be made to pay or return the property full stop! There is can and should never be any negotiation on that point.
If you ask me any aide to Cuba should have always been and should always be predicated on their complete and unc
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The big problem, for America at the time, was trade unions. This was pushed back against very fervently, and even today trade unions are seen as un American in many circles. Unions lead to socialism, socialism leads to communism, and that was the belief. Never mind that mistreating or exploiting workers to maximize profits is what leads to unions.
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However, I ca
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So you think it was ok for American companies to continue to do business with Nazi Germany long after the world knew what evil,shit they were?
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Huge tracts (Score:5, Insightful)
But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you're going to get, lad: the strongest Communist paradise in these isles. Viva Cuba!
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It's the fault of non-communist countries for refusing to prop them up while they tromped around trying to spread their poisonous philosophy by force of arms all over Africa, Central and South America and other Caribbean islands.
We should have sent them food, money and weapons to help them out.
Oh yeah, and Trump! So there!
hey but (Score:2)
Hey, but the healthcare is free!
We're ignoring the most important point! (Score:2)
Where are the billons in support? (Score:2)
With a title like that... (Score:2)
Do Something Smart, US (Score:2)
One of the smartest (and probably cheapest in the long run) thing the US could do is send a few US-flagged crude oil tankers down to Cuba to fuel them up.
Doesn't have to be military. Hell, doesn't even have to be US-registered. Just some big-assed tankers with a big-assed US flag flapping on the stern! The word would get around fast enough, once those lights start coming back on.