Power outages in communist-ruled Cuba – a country that already suffers severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine – have touched a political nerve and are widely credited with sparking the July 2021 anti-government protests, the largest ever. since the revolution of former President Fidel Castro in 1959.
Last Tuesday, the island experienced its third major power outage in just over a week. It stretched 700 km from Cienfuegos province in south-central Cuba to Guantanamo on the southeastern tip of the country, leaving more than half of the country’s 11 million people without electricity. Isolated power cuts were also reported in the capital, Havana.
Cuban officials blame fuel shortages, lack of maintenance and difficulties in processing Cuban heavy crude oil, which is also flared in power plants, for affecting power generation. These problems, they say, have been exacerbated by the Cold War-era US embargo on Cuba, which makes it more difficult to finance and purchase parts, fuel and capital investments.
But it is rather President Díaz Canel, his erroneous economic policy and the insistence on a failed ideological rooting that requires efforts from the people by appealing to the worn-out slogans of the time of Fidel Castro – without really listening to the demands of the people Cuban-, who bury every day the last vestiges of the Cuban communist utopia.
According to the analyzes of most specialists, the only effective solution begins, at the national level, by restoring a balance of priorities, abandoning ideology and favoring the well-being of populations, freeing national private initiative and setting up a more favorable tax model for the Cuban private entrepreneur.
In the meantime, this long-lasting short circuit triggers spontaneous demonstrations – always strongly repressed – against the backdrop of the complex economic situation of the island, due exclusively to the policy of diverting the bulk of the income that Cuba has obtained for decades to finance the plans for the ideological expansion of Castroism in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and among the pro-Cuban revolution political elites in the developed countries of Europe (e.g. the “comrade » Mélenchon) and the United States.
For Castroism, the development of the country was never a priority and was always subject to the triumph and ideological expansion of the Revolution. In a country of darkness, the acknowledgment of failure is more and more flagrant…
