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October 21, 2024

Socialism strikes again: Cubans plunged into blackouts

By Monica Showalter

As leftists continue to praise communist Cuba, or at least maintain a polite silence, life is getting extraordinarily bad in the Castroite communist socialist island paradise.

Since Friday, it's blackouts, on and off, across the island, except for in the wealthy tourist hotels, where Cubans are beaten by government thugs if they dare enter.

Oh, and you can bet the party elites, out on their yachts or in wealthy enclaves hidden away from the locals and surrounded by armed guards, have gotten their electricity, too. They get it off the grid, which has collapsed.

Yoani Sanchez, the indefatigable dissident observer of Cuba, writing from inside Cuba, put this description out:

 

 

Here's a Google Translate:

Keys to an energy collapse

by Yoani Sanchez

It was coming. Every day that passed, the electricity deficit in Cuba grew and the hours of blackouts became longer. Last Friday, around eleven in the morning, the energy system collapsed after the main thermoelectric plant in the country went out of service. Schools did not open to receive students, cultural activities were cancelled and all services that are not considered vital were suspended. Daily life stopped and the country entered a pause from which no one knows when we will emerge.

During the 1990s, during the crisis known by the euphemism of the Special Period, the official discourse warned of the possibility of the nation hitting rock bottom. That abyss was called Option Zero and would bring with it the installation of collective pots to feed oneself in each neighborhood, the end of the electricity supply and the total abandonment of public transportation. Vehicles would stop rolling on the streets and airplanes would no longer fly through our skies. Fortunately, that terrible scenario did not come to pass because the Cuban regime, against the economic ropes and fearing a social explosion, dollarized the country, opened the nation to foreign investment, used the exodus of the rafters to release some of the accumulated social pressure and allowed private businesses for the first time in decades.

Three decades have passed since that dark moment in our history and this October the ghost of the Zero Option has knocked on the door again. On Thursday night, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero acknowledged what could no longer be denied: "We have had to paralyze the economy in order to guarantee a minimum of electric service." At that same time, on the central 23rd Street in Havana's Vedado, the tallest building on the island showed many of its windows lit up. Also known as Torre K, it is intended to be a luxury hotel and, as such, enjoys a stable and uninterrupted electric supply. Around the ugly concrete block, most of the blocks were in darkness while the monotonous voice of the official assured on television that we must resist and overcome the current hardships.

Lack of investment in the energy sector has been one of the reasons that has led Cuba to the present day without electricity. While money continues to flow to build four and five star accommodations for international tourism, the ailing energy industry has barely received any occasional repairs and superficial maintenance. The result of the lack of foresight and government inefficiency has been that the country's main thermoelectric plants are mountains of rusty iron incapable of satisfying the demand of the residential sector and much less of the productive framework.

At this point, the authorities seem not to understand the gravity of the situation and are trying to activate the worn-out springs of nationalism, blaming the problem on the US embargo. They are also calling for people to tighten their belts and save electricity at home. They use the hackneyed war vocabulary of fighting against adversity and appealing to the “trenches of ideas” to overcome the moment. Nothing seems to help them so far. The streets and social networks are repeating a clamor for a radical change in politics and economics that was previously only whispered. Popular anger is growing and there does not seem to be an official project, in the short or medium term, to make people's lives more bearable. More difficult and dark days are coming.

How was that again? They solved their crisis in the '90s by shipping migrants to the states?

Guess what they're likely to try to do with this terrible crisis? There are still several months of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to get that deed done.

It's obviously a failure of socialism. Maintaining electricity is apparently what capitalist pigs do. For Cuba, it's always all about getting another sugar daddy to bail them out -- Russia, China, East Germany, North Korea, Venezuela -- except that they are running out of sugar daddies now. Mexico has decided to jump in and have another, having been burned multiple times on its loans to Cuba. It's sending Cuba free oil, despite its state oil company's dire indebtedness.

It didn't stop the blackouts, because they don't have equipment to pour the fuel into.

 

 

Oh, they say they'll get it fixed soon:

 

 

But they can't.

The excusemaking is amazing:

 

 

Here's the astonishing thing: The socialist failures are coming from the exact same people who failed Cuba again and again since Castro shot his way into power in 1959.

Who's behind this? One Ramiro Valdez Menendez, a Cuban 'barbudo' dating from Castro's mountain guerrilla days. The only thing he knows about electricity is how to use it to torture dissidents. He messed up Cuba's electricity, moved on to Venezuela and messed up their electricity, giving them many nationwide blackouts, and now he's back to Cuba again, making another mess with the electricity. Failing upward? Try failing upward for 65 years. All that matters is his party loyality.

Pedro Burelli is a leading Venezuelan dissident Democrat detested by communist regimes. He writes of the graybeard on the end in the picture:

 

 

CUBA | IMAGE OF A COUNTRY THAT SWITCHED OUT This image captures the drama that Cuba has been experiencing for decades. The 'embargo' or 'blockade' remains the eternal excuse to justify misery, but here the real cause is shown. On the left, Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, alias 'Charco de Sangre', 92, in uniform. He has personified, from day one, the relentless repression and lack of empathy that have kept alive a 'revolution' that failed both materially and spiritually. The island is dying because men like Valdés, obsessed with sowing terror, have blocked any attempt at reform or change that threatens their brutal monopoly on power. On the right, Miguel Díaz-Canel, born after the triumph of the bearded men, but a mere puppet of theirs. A pawn whose strings are almost visible, forced to become a repressor after failing as a bureaucrat to solve the countless problems of the system that he himself defends under the shadow of the terror of Valdés and a dome of ruthless old men and stupefied young people. It doesn't matter who else appears in this image, framed by the persistent evil and systemic ineptitude of Castro-communism. If there are still millions of victims in Cuba, it is because the sea surrounding the island is as dark and treacherous as the men who govern it.

As for the Cubans themselves, there's a lot of talk of unrest in the streets.

 

 

 

 

We have seen this before, and how the regime stomps it out, or just releases the freedom flotillas, so I would not get my hopes up. But as Herbert Stein used to say -- anything that can't go on, will stop. At some point it will stop, and if President Trump gets into office and shuts the open border, it will have to stop.

Maybe they will get that regime out at long last and stop it. Perhaps tiny Israel's defeat of the monstrous terrorist groups encircling it will be some kind of inspiration.

Image: Yoani Sanchez, Twitter screen shot

 

 

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