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Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

reuters.com

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Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#11

Post by worstspotgain »

voidwtf wrote: post #4
ChumpGPT wrote: post #3

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…

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?

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.

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#12

Post by JumpinJack_Cash »

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

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#13

Post by Scoundreller »

Arnt wrote: post #10
Scoundreller wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

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

As of 2018

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#14

Post by blackhawkC17 »

voidwtf wrote: post #4
ChumpGPT wrote: post #3

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…

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?

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.

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#15

Post by proc0 »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #12

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 co…

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

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#16

Post by proc0 »

legitster wrote: post #8

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 ec…

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.

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#17

Post by proc0 »

voidwtf wrote: post #4
ChumpGPT wrote: post #3

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…

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?

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.

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#18

Post by throwaway199956 »

ChumpGPT wrote: post #3

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…

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

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#19

Post by jrflowers »

proc0 wrote: post #17
voidwtf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

I’ve always wondered —- if communism is so inherently flawed that it will by definition go away on its own, why bother punishing or fighting it? The US embargo on Cuba seems kind of silly if communism would evaporate on its own

Re: Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

#20

Post by proc0 »

jrflowers wrote: post #19
proc0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve always wondered —- if communism is so inherently flawed that it will by definition go away on its own, why bother punishing or fighting it? The US embargo on Cuba seems kind of silly if communism would evaporate on its own

I literally stated the opposite of that.. it keeps re-emerging because it takes advantage of feelings. People want to fix the problems of the world, communism offers solutions that don't work but sound nice.
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