The Truth About the Cuban Blackouts

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady. Excerpts:

"Blaming the U.S. embargo for Cuba’s economic disaster has lost its political firepower because the law has been watered down. Today Cuba can buy, with cash, all the food, medicine and construction materials it wants from the U.S. It can get lots of other stuff from the rest of the world."

"Cuba’s economic crisis is caused by a hard-currency shortage. Output from once-vibrant export industries like sugar, tobacco, coffee and fruit can’t even supply the domestic market. Barren agricultural fields are covered in weeds. Manufacturing is gone. Even tourism, which the regime has tried to hype since the 1990s, is in bad shape. Handouts from the Soviet Union, bilateral lenders and Venezuela, which kept the country afloat for decades, are no more."

"Even before January, . . . the monthly Cuban ration book supplied food for less than two weeks." 

"If not for remittances, families would suffer even greater privation." 

"he cause of the power failures is the antiquated grid which, . . . requires an investment of $8 billion to $10 billion over three to five years."

"new power plants have to be built because the existing ones sit on polluted land."