Cuba hit with fifth blackout in less than a year with 10M people in the dark | Hacker News Reader

Cuba hit with fifth blackout in less than a year with 10M people in the dark

theguardian.com

18 pointsPaulHoule28 comments

I had communist leaning political sentiment in my youth, and traveled to Cuba in my early 20's.

You could tell the country (and Havana in particular) had once been stunning. I was horrified by what I saw; just how broken the infrastructure was, how poor and destitute the people were. The quality of food was poor, the country dirty, access to basic energy needs unmet. The cost of basic services high (i.e. $100 USD cab ride from airport to Havana).

I spent a lot of time getting to know locals and understanding what life looked like. Ration books for food, suppression of speech and behavior/associations. At the time, I was a mad keen surfer and met a few locals who showed me their hand-made boards, sourced from scrap and supplies stolen from their jobs. The state at the time viewed it as a non-sanctioned activity, and so no resources were approved for it.

That experience for me was certainly the straw that broke the camels back in terms of sympathy for communist-leaning ideologies. I hope the Cuban people break free of state tyranny.

> I was horrified by what I saw; just how broken the infrastructure was, how poor and destitute the people were.

Yet they manage to have better healthcare overall.

How do you define better?

Cost?

The U.S. leads in advanced diagnostics (MRI, CT scans), surgical techniques, pharmaceuticals, and access to the latest therapies. (Cuban hospitals often lack basic supplies, equipment, and medications.)

Care? Patients in Cuba often face rationing and shortages of drugs, even common antibiotics or painkillers. The U.S. has issues with affordability but generally ensures availability once in the system.

Doctors? Cuba trains many doctors, but the government sends them abroad for revenue, leaving gaps in domestic care.

Advanced treatments? The U.S. is the global leader in pharmaceutical development, medical devices, and innovation.

“better” might imply higher quality of care and outcomes for complex conditions, where the U.S. clearly outperforms.

Compared to many places in Latin America, yes, but that’s not a high standard.

Compared to the US. While not uncontested (they are accused of falsifying data), cuba posts better infant mortality rates.

A lot of the medical issues in Cuba aren't related to the healthcare system but rather to trade embargos. It's a small miracle they do as well as they do given the constraints of being an island nation.

The reason for their success on a shoestring budget is administrative competence. They have a large number of clinics (rather than big hospital complexes) and education in medicine starts at those clinics. Future doctors work and are educated in medicine moving up into specialties. It's a little like making everyone that wants to practice medicine start as a orderly in a family medicine clinic.

IMO, this is superior to the US system of requiring several years of schooling before ever interacting with patients. And if you know an old nurse, you'll know they often do know a lot more than new doctors.

This amidst an unrelenting united states “embargo” - in another world this embargo would be called the crime against humanity that it is.

I often think of this Logic article on Cuban information retrieval design. “ Informatics of the Oppressed”, by Rodrigo Ochigame https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/

I don't think you understand what an embargo is. The USA isn't blockading Cuba; they're free to trade with other countries like Venezuela or whatever. International trade requires the consent of both parties, and there's no moral or legal obligation to trade with a hostile foreign power (or allow our financial systems to be used to facilitate such trade).

The embargo would likely end soon if the Cuban government takes basic, simple steps like introducing open multiparty democracy, free market capitalism, and freedom for political prisoners. These steps would obviously benefit all Cubans so there's no possible reason to delay making those changes regardless of their impact on international trade.

The US enforces the embargo by cutting trade with any country doing trade with Cuba. It's not just a simple embargo between the US and Cuba, it's one that forces a country/company to make the decision "trade with Cuba or trade with the US".

Yes, exactly. Countries are free to make that choice. They can't have their cake and eat it, too.

> The US isn't blockading Cuba

That's what you said, but it is a just a coy semantic game by any real interpretation. The US took extra measures and went out of there way to strong arm any potential trade partners.

No sane or responsible nation would give up trade with the US and major parts of it's hemisphere of influence (Europe, Japan, Korea, etc) to access an island with nothing to offer in an inconvenient place.

The US, out of spite, demolished the Cuban economy and then spent decades beating the corpse for good measure long after the fight was over or justified.

Last I checked, they basically only got access to meaningful trade from Venezuela and China for a few decades, right?

The Cubans demolished their own economy. That's what Communists always do. Their problems are 100% self inflicted. They could end the embargo tomorrow if they take the necessary measures.

And the US just used their spies to assist in the overthrow of a few dozen (often democratic) countries in the 20th century because it was funny.

We would never use our economic or military might to sabotage competing nations or ideologies and any suffering in the world that looks like a direct result of those policies is simply the result of communism. It was totally a fair playing field.

Operation Cyclone wasn't real. The mujahideen aren't real. Don't look at the CIA behind the curtain.

While we're at it, do you want to really go all in and explain to me how McCarthyism also wasn't real? All those people just believed in an ideology that naturally results in their imprisonment, the US government would never silence anyone for their beliefs or anything.

This is actually nonsense, and it's silly that so many people repeat it as a justification of the corrupt, repressive Cuban regime when it's so easy to refute. The U.S. sanctions apply mainly to US companies and entities, and while they can sometimes be applied to companies in other countries, it's rare, and even more so for other countries as a whole. I know for a fact that many major countries regularly trade with Cuba. Are you going to now say that Canada has been cut off from U.S. trade because it also trades with Cuba? That's news to me. (Trump's idiotic tariff war notwithstanding since it's from a separate cause)

The state of the embargo has changed with the administrations.

Clinton relaxed it in 2000. Bush did nothing with it, Obama further relaxed it in 2014 and 2015, Trump reversed some of those relaxations in 2017, in 2021 Biden restored the state designation as a terrorist state.

During the height of the embargo, it absolutely was the case that the US applied maximum pressure and soft power in keeping countries from trading with Cuba. That was even part of the point of USAID "do what we tell you, or we'll stop these aid shipments" (not specifically for Cuba, but more broadly).

You know of companies personally trading there because the nature of the embargo has changed over the last 25 years. I'm old enough that I remember the pre 2000 relationship with Cuba. Admittedly, that probably makes me think the state is more harsh than it currently is. Old age does weird things to how you perceive things.

Written by someone who apparently doesn't know a thing about Latin American healthcare and has no experience of it. As someone who lives in a major Latin American country and has for many years, and has spent time in several others, I can tell you that both the public and private healthcare standards are very good for the most part, and standards are a lot higher than whatever caricature idea of some banana republic jungle hospital you seem to have. Mexico and Brazil in particular have hospitals that are at least as good as most American counterparts would be.

That's a horrific price to pay for the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Personally I look to Scandinavia for the ideal model. High economic freedom & mobile capital, excellent healthcare & public services, high degree of social rights & liberties.

The Scandinavian economic model has certain positives but it's hardly ideal. Collapsing population demographics, high immigration rates, and the need to increase military spending are creating a lot of pressure. But more importantly there is a severe lack of economic dynamism: in terms of major technology companies they basically have Spotify, Ericsson, and that's it. So long term they risk being left behind by the world economy, and reduced to the status of vassal states.

>Yet they manage to have better healthcare overall.

Really? You've got the numbers and overall view to know this, as opposed to simply the stats from a famously mendacious, repressive one-party regime that has been repressing all kinds of access to information against even its own people for decades?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicko

This is your response? That the U.S healthcare system is full of problems no doubt, but you think referencing a Michael Moore documentary is a case of using good data? Hilarious.

Yeah but it's also been under severe embargo the entire time. So are you seeing the effects of communism or the embargo? It's hard to tell.

They still have the freedom to trade with many countries (China, Russia, Iran etc). China alone would meet the majority of their import needs.

Cuba in reality produces very little goods by way of quantity and quality.

Trade has to go both ways.

Maybe China can trade with Cuba but doesn't need sugar. Maybe countries that badly would want Cuban sugar aren't allowed to trade with Cuba. etc.

China needs sugar and is allowed to trade with Cuba. They import about $3B of sugar every year, mostly from Brazil. Most likely Cuba just isn't cost competitive: Communists have never managed to get the basics of agriculture right.

The embargo certainly isn't forcing Communists to suppress free speech or hold political prisoners.

yes sure but that's off topic. The parent wasn't talking about that, they were talking about the quality of the food being poor, electricity infrastructure bad etc. That stuff is impacted by being severely restricted from trade.

Those things are inextricably linked. If Cuba abandoned Communism then they would have plenty of food, even if the US trade embargo remained in place.

So much of this is phrased as “communism bad” and sure, it has been. But this lesson could equally be phrased as “electing personality cult strongman and gutting the mechanisms that prevented personal rule and dominance of the economy are bad.” Just as food for thought.

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