Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-implements-emergency-measures-millions-go-without-electricity-2024-10-18/

by Scoundreller • 2 years ago

30 43 2 years ago

ChumpGPT• 2 years ago

Cuba could be the most prosperous island in the Caribbean, they have a railroad, miles and miles of beautiful beaches, farm land, etc and yet can't make communism work. I friend returned from a short trip and said even the finest resorts have no bread amongst other things. The population is malnourished and live in squalor. Castro's Dream....

My grandfather use to say "80 years of communism and we are still lining up for bread to eat and soap to wash with". Can you believe there are those who still embrace it, think they can do it better and it will be a utopia.

voidwtf• 2 years ago

Is the problem the tenets of communism? or is the problem the dictators and strongmen who inevitably rise to the top? or the corruption that grows from unchecked power?

kyleee• 2 years ago

Hard to say, but a good governance system must guard against the inevitable abuses of all in power (really at all levels)

worstspotgain• 2 years ago

It's primarily the lack of incentives, e.g. China in 1990 compared to 2010.

Communism's "time in the sun" was not really about its ideological merits. It was just something fed to the intellectuals to get them to buy into the Russian/Soviet planetary takeover. It made people believe they were fighting for a cause rather than someone else's petty interest.

blackhawkC17• 2 years ago

Communism requires a strongman to enforce top-down.

Most people would reject communism if they had the freedom, so the freedom is one of the first things to go under communist rule.

proc04• 2 years ago

All of the above, and they're linked together. Communism requires centralization of decision making, which creates huge bottlenecks, stunts growth, and also becomes a single point of failure that a corrupt leader can easily takeover.

The only reason communism keeps re-emerging is because it takes advantage of people's empathy, promising that it can directly address the needs of the many.

throwaway199956• 2 years ago

May be you should visit Haiti and see which is better.

ecocentrik• 2 years ago

Haiti has many, many other problems including being severely deforested.

DebtDeflation• 2 years ago

A "black start" of a power grid is a completely different situation than restoring a partial grid failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w

legitster• 2 years ago

Cuban GDP is actually the highest it's every been, thanks to the opening up of the tourism industry in the early 2000s and the introduction of direct foreign investment in 2018.

This isn't a money or embargo issue or even (directly) a communism issue. The current regime is simply incompetent: They don't have any expertise and refused to cooperate with other countries on developing their infrastructure. Venezuela's economy collapsed and Cuba was free loading on them. And Cuba has a bad reputation among other trade partners other countries want to trade with.

Scoundreller2• 2 years ago

I kinda thought tourism would have been in the dumps since the US bans you from the visa waiver program just for visiting Cuba as of Jan 12, 2021 (a last breath by Trump after losing the election but not office).

That doesn’t impact Canadians, but Canadians aren’t going to Cuba as often as they used to.

There are still some flights to/from Russia, but it has to take the long route.

Maybe they get enough to make up for all that from South America.

Arnt2• 2 years ago

Wikipedia tells all: Canada, the US, Italy, Germany, Russia, France and the UK are the top sources of tourists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Cuba

proc04• 2 years ago

The reason why communism is always destined to fail is because it cannot process large amounts of information from the market. It's like a single core CPU trying to run a large operating system with millions of processes and services. There has to be a decentralized system for markets to grow to the scale of a first world economy, it's the only way to handle that much information and as a consequence growth.

e-master• 2 years ago

I’m curious why was this downvoted, sounds like an interesting idea to me.

noduerme4• 2 years ago

Replace "communism" with "centralized economy" and I think you make a fair point about a single CPU.

Communism can be centralized or decentralized (see the early definition of "soviet", which was a local and decentralized council-based power structure, intentionally created to counteract centralized Czarist influence... how full circle we've come).

Communism tends to give rise to centralized committees controlling the economy, but so can fascism, or even relatively benign democratic organs like the EPA. Communism has other faults, unrelated to centralization. Notably, the removal of economic incentive, and its replacement with wishful thinking about man's higher instincts to donate personal time and effort to fellow man, doesn't align with reality in either a centralized or decentralized economy.

mozman• 2 years ago

Communism will never work due to human ambition. There will be corruption, nobody will ever be equal. I have no opinion on who determines what other than corruption.

Cuba is full of rich and futile soil ripe for crops but the government owns the land and forbids it.

No system with humans will ever be perfect but communism doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Has it ever worked?

LargoLasskhyfv• 2 years ago

Some people seemed to have some ideas/visions about that, but failed to implement them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Maybe some other people wanted them to fail, considering the time and place, and what else happened there in around that timeframe.

JumpinJack_Cash3• 2 years ago

What the US is doing to Cuba is nothing sort of criminal. It's been 60 years since the bay of Pigs and Cuban Crisis, it's time to end the embargo.

One thing that I was hopeful in the Biden v. Trump 2024 was that whoever won wouldn't have felt the need to win Florida anymore in their lifetime and so they could have gone for the legacy of ending the embargo on Cuba during their Presidency.

Instead now with Harris of course she's gonna need Florida twice

proc04• 2 years ago

US is doing nothing. No country has the "right" to trade with any other. Maybe Cuba should start admitting their system does not work.

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

A 60-year-old diplomatic row aside, where is The logic in continuing at embargo on Cuba considering any of the other countries and governments the US allows business and travel with?

noduerme4• 2 years ago

Sorry, but why is it criminal? I wish the US and Europe would embargo every regime that jails its political adversaries.

JumpinJack_Cash3• 2 years ago

China ring a bell? Russia until the invasion of Ukraine ring a bell? Saudi Arabia and GCC countries where this happens every 10 years or so (publicly and/or silently)

justinko3• 2 years ago

If trade opened up you think money would flow to the people? The military dictatorship controls absolutely everything.

Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

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