Sanctions on Cuba have strangled their economy and spread misery among the population.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112
US is almost alone in spearheading the embargo.
To show you how confident we are in this, we will engineer the harshest economic hit job and we will sanction the sh out of them, and every other country that tries something similar.
Respectfully, the US and its lackeys
The embargo doesn't exist because the US is correct in its assessment that Cuba's economic system won't succeed, an opinion shared by Cuba's largest trading partner: https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...
They have the whole world, their economy shouldn't need us.
Let them work with China and see how well that works out
However, this is an incomplete picture. Cuba has essentially no market economy whatsoever. All evidence throughout history shows this is economic suicide and is undoubtedly an even larger cause of their issues. It's so bad that in the FT this week (https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...) this incredible line is written:
"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."
That's the CHINESE (Marxist at least in name) government lamenting the lack of Cuban adoption of market principles.
Further, the article makes quite clear that the US Embargo, for whatever it is worth, doesn't extend to the entire world (which should be obvious) noting very specific relations with multiple major Chinese companies. So even though Cuba is clearly able to trade with the second largest economy in the world (with giant enterpries like Huawei and ZTE), with a population of greater than 1B, they are still somehow completely incapable of operating a function al economy.
What's more, a cursory understanding of Cuban history should show that they are avowedly enemies of the US having once attempted to host nuclear missiles aimed at the US. What is the US to do? Actively support a regime which has threatened tens of millions of its people?
Cuba is collapsing because of failed economic policies and the resulting emigration.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/travellers-visited-cuba-last-11-1...
Why don’t we let the markets decide?
Cuba trades just fine with China, EU, Canada even, not even considering South America. The numbers are out there. Also countries like Venezuela were not nearly as heavily sanctioned and yet they speed-ran the left playbook to run their economy into the ground in record time. On the other hand, somehow sanctions didn't do much to damage Russian internal economy, as much as I wish they did - probably because even mafiosos and strongmen are not as dumb as leftists. OTOH^2 economically illiterate Erdogan was able to make lira crash without any sanctions. That was from just one stupid idea, whereas leftism is a whole stupid system.
Also, why should they need trade to provide basic services that most countries provide locally? Forget power, Cuba is/was one of the major, and most famous, tobacco producers. A middle-aged US man once told me he often goes on vacations to Cuba (flying thru Canada), because "girls there will sleep with you for a pack of American cigarettes". The regime is so incompetent they cannot even provide basic local goods that require ~no trade.
China's Xi vows to support Cuba in defending its national sovereignty https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-xi-vows-support-cuba-de...
The other way around, China puts Taiwan (the closest China has to its own Cuba) on a list of major countries with 291 bn USD* whereas Cuba's total with everyone put together was estimated to be 4.6 bn USD in 2017.
* http://guangzhou.customs.gov.cn/customs/302249/zfxxgk/279982...
Roughly 5% of the population is fleeing the island each year: https://miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cub...
Since when was Cuba, post Castro, anything other than impoverished?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/cuba-power-grid-1.7356496
It appears power is being restored atleast in some parts.
Also airports and flight operations seems not to have been affected.
Considering the recent crisis seem to have been caused by lack of maintenance solar is probably a good option for Cuba as it doesn't require much. Once you set up a park it'll work for 25 years at least and even continue working for decades afterwards on tolerable levels. You'll need to do greenfield work and replace a panel once in a while, but a lot of parks can be almost left alone from an engineering perspective.
This is a bit of a side note, but heat isn't a benefit. I know we tend to think of hot areas which get a lot of sun as good places for solar plants, but today's solar tech loses a lot of efficiency to heat in temperatures above 25 degrees celsius. By a lot I mean that we don't even build parks in areas that go above 20-25 degrees if there are no outside incentives like green tariffs or NGO support.
Would you be willing to post some references on this? I trust you know what you're talking about, but I'd like to read more. I thought 25 deg C or 77 deg F was the peak efficiency temperature and typical panels slowly lost efficiency on either side that. I didn't know of anywhere in the continental US that was always below 20-25 C.
China, the main seller of solar, has publicly stated that Cuba is not paying their bills
https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...
Edit: the name of the article is catchy: "China is not Cuba’s sugar daddy’: ties between communist nations weaken"
Edit2: This is a summary of the FT article in spanish by a cuban newspaper. I suppose the most important arguments and data are included here https://www.14ymedio.com/internacional/china-senala-falta-vo...
Edit3: Thanks for the transcript. And someone shared the article here https://archive.ph/tz2Sf
Despite Cuba opening up over the last decade, there's still not good investment infrastructure to support large scale solar and wind installations. In other words, it's still a semi communist government that leans much more towards Soviet style versus China.
The article itself talks a bit about how the general electrical infrastructure in the country is aging and needs maintenance and upgrades.
Combine the government policies, general economy, hostility to foreign investment, etc and you hopefully get an idea of why solar hasn't had a major impact.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste or something along those lines.
The best thing US could do is relax the decades long sanctions on Cuba (which almost the whole world opposes)
Hope Cubans will some day be free people again.
The goal was Cuba was openly hostile to the US and so we swung our large economic …stick, around. They took our assets and then held nuclear missiles for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, essentially putting them incredibly close to our shores.
They’re lucky the US didn’t do more, frankly.
- Sugar = historic / principle natural resource exports for FX to fund imports since island has not much else (except doctors)
- Geography before USSR = next to US, good for USSR military posture -> support + handouts during cold war
- Geography after USSR collapse = nice place to vacation, again FX to fund imports
IIRC Castro pivoted from sugar to tourism post USSR collapse... and it worked alright. Look up charts for decline in sugar displaced by more tourism increase post 90s. GDP growing pretty steady. Wasn't going to make Cuba high income, but can kind of see how tourism driven model might work. Problem is of course global drop in demand = bad for tourism. Cuba international arrivals precovid about ~4.5m, last year was ~1.5m = empty FX for imports.
The big long term problem with tourism strategy... 300m+ American's not travelling to Cuba.
The short/medium term fix is Canadians, who consistuted something stupid like 40% of inbound tourists (~4.5m = ~2m tourists/vistors + ~2.5m stopovers) to Cuba, ~1M+ per year. Canadian tourists down to 600k. Which is partly due to Canadian economy. But also... it's been 20+ years of cheap Canadian flights to Cuba... at some point every Canadian that wants to goto Cuba has gone to Cuba. And really we're talking about 60% of Canadians living ~4 hour flight from Cuba. There isn't another advanced economy in the region to pick up slack. Except US... with even less travel time. So it's true Cuba can trade with lots of countries, many like Canada who despite US alignment, don't agree with US sanctions. But Cuba's got nothing significant to trade (enough to fund FX that can cover imports) for except nice weather, which is constrained to the amount of people who want to pay for nice Cuban weather, which happens to be a lot of Canadians. Everyone else short flight away has nice weather of their own.
A Chinese isn't going to pay $1500+ to fly (more importantly) 30 hours to Havanna.
If Cuba wants to get anywhere, it needs to make nice with US, and US tourists. Compare to Dominican Repubic... basically Cuba population and ~2M+ extra tourists per year, but that 2M+ are US tourists, and DR per capita is upper middle income.
OR Cuba needs to convince PRC to be sugar daddy like USSR. Cuba in mid 2010s imported "only" a couple billion... i.e. it doesn't take much imports in $$$ for the country to not be total shitshow like now. But billion here and there is real money. It's to be blunt, military base the size of US in JP or SKR money (1-4B). PRC currently not interested in that, because that's how you get nukes deployed in SKR and JP, and past history suggest that's how you start WW3. And lets be honest, if this ever happens, US is going to lean HARD on Canada shutdown tourists, and west aligned bloc going to actually come aboard US sanction train.
What a world we live in!
