Do tell. Or could it be that the vestigial Castroite communist government has strangled itself, and can no longer be rescued by its socialist alumni in Latin America?
The New York Times prefers to give credit to Donald Trump. Undoubtedly, Trump will accept it with delight:
Cuba is confronting the United States’ first effective blockade since the Cuban Missile Crisis and running out of fuel fast, pushing the nation toward a humanitarian crisis and its government to the edge of collapse, according to a New York Times analysis of shipping data and satellite images.
Cuban tankers have hardly left the island’s shores for months. Oil-rich allies have halted shipments or declined to come to the rescue. The U.S. military has seized ships that have supported Cuba. And in recent days, vessels roaming the Caribbean Sea in search of fuel for Cuba have come up empty or been intercepted by the U.S. authorities.
Last week, a tanker linked to Cuba burned fuel for five days to get to the port in Curaçao but then left without cargo, according to ship-tracking data. Three days later, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a tanker full of Colombian fuel oil en route to Cuba that had gotten within 70 miles of the island, the data showed.
Trump certainly deserves credit for forcing Cuba to address the decades-long crisis of its economic failures more acutely. As the NYT duly notes, Trump has cut off Venezuelan oil provided by Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro to allow the Castroites in Havana to barely survive on free or extremely cheap energy. Trump has enforced that with a robust naval and Coast Guard effort to capture sanctioned tankers, whether or not they carry sanctioned oil, and whether or not that oil was intended for Cuba. Trump has also forced Mexico and other trading partners of Cuba to choose between that trade and trade with the US, with predictable results.
In all but name, this is a blockade, and it's doing the damage Trump intends. However, that damage mainly results from Cuba's longstanding status as a charity case among socialist countries and other tinpot dictatorships, and that status existed because of the accident of geography that accompanied Cuba's revolucion.
It didn't take long for Fidel Castro to impoverish his nation with his oh-so-brave communist junta. Castro had to align with the Soviet Union to survive on subsidies almost from the start. The USSR was delighted to have Cuba as its vassal, given its proximity (90 miles) to the US mainland. The Cuban Missile Crisis cemented that partnership for decades, until the USSR blinked out of existence thanks to its own internal economic and political contradictions. The Castros should have fallen in the 1990s, but the US had bigger fish to fry in the Middle East and the Clintons were not ideologically inclined to take a hard line on Cuba, or for that matter, the socialist revolutions that the Castros exported throughout Latin America, in return for some economic support when those revolutions succeeded.
Their most successful project was Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Chavez rapidly nationalized industries, especially the oil and energy industries, and started subsidizing the Castros' economic ruin with cheap-to-free oil. In return, Chavez and then Maduro received high-value security support and intelligence, not to mention the protection of other leftist regimes in the region. That allowed the Castroites to continue imposing its failed economic and political policies on the Cuban people.
Now that the oil has been cut off and the region is moving away from socialist dictatorships, Cuba no longer has any patron or benefactor. The Castroites have to find their own energy, either through legitimate purchases in the non-sanctioned market or by developing it themselves. Seven decades of communism have left them completely unequipped to do any of the above.
Trump's blockade is doing damage, but the real failure is Cuba's communist model and Castro's revolucion. Halting the shipments of free oil is finally exposing that failure to the entire world.
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