Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness | Hacker News Reader

Cuba's power grid fails, plunging country into darkness

reuters.com

30 pointsScoundreller43 comments

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

I see, I misunderstood you. You were saying that there is no issue inherent to the tenets of communism that would make it fail

You're referring to the govt failing to maintain itself in power, whereas OP is referring to a govt failing as a functional system for the improvement of society.

I'm no fan of communism but that's a reductive take. China of today is communist in name only, but it's still very centrally managed, and that didn't stop China from becoming a global economic superpower. One could say something similar for Japan of the early 20th century, or, to a lesser extent, South Korea in the 60s when the economy was very much centrally planned under a dictator.

I'd call that luck. Wait until a bad or stupid actor gets to power. This is the main problem with communism. It all depends on one single person and how they are.

>I'd call that luck. Wait until a bad or stupid actor gets to power.

See: their zero covid policy. Great at first, but the stuck dogmatically to it even after omicron, which led to massive deaths.

I'll grant that communism makes it easy for a single person to have all the power, but "one single person in power can ruin everything" is not exactly unique to communism, and I am unconvinced that it explains why communist nations tend to stay poor.

Happens everywhere, but the way power in communism works makes bad stuff happen many times faster. In democracy there is a long time until a bad actor can do real damage. There are policies and various mechanisms that prevent that(to a point). Even bureaucracy works to some extent.

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

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

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.

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.

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

What does this mean? AFAICT, it's either a minor detail, hardly worth mentioning, or it implies that there have been notable changes since then. If you did intend to imply that, could you elaborate?

Canada is probably also in large part “the US” - there are no direct flights there from the US. Why we keep up this idiotic embargo is anyone’s guess.

Lots of Canada flies directly to Cuba (Halifax, Montreal, Toronto[0]). There are (or were?) some historical "can't use US airspace" rules about flights travelling there (so western Canada has to connect).

[0]: https://www.aircanada.com/en-ca/flights-from-canada-to-cuba

There’s only one direct flight and that’s from Miami with American Airlines.

You have a lot of research to do if you think the problem is the embargo.

Wasn’t aware there’s now a direct flight from Miami. I went there through Canada back in the day.

Actually there is also direct from Houston via United Airlines.

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.

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

Seems to be a reference to the debate on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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?

>> considering any of the other countries

Precisely. The flaw is not in continuing an embargo againsy Cuba. It's in not putting an embargo on China, Qatar, and other regimes that treat their workers/denizens like slaves.

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

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)

What part of my comment didn't you understand? Yes, all of them. We shouldn't do business with human rights violators. Full stop.

Yes but among those the least dangerous and the ones whose interests are more aligned with the US is Cuba.

Geography is still king, US, Mexico,Canada and the Caribbean , some would say all the way to Cape Horn in Patagonia all share the same interests.

Hillary would always repeat this thing about safety in America, meaning the whole continent .

If you wanted to bring back manufacturing jobs you'd start from India and China and leave Mexico as the last

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com