A month ago, we brought you the remarkable news that glorious socialist Cuba, by its own official accounting, saw a 10th of its entire population flee the country in the year 2023. Our glib headline contained a bleak joke about the increasingly compromised ability of the Cuban state to provide electricity: last week, as if to confirm our prejudices, the Cuban electrical grid collapsed completely, leaving most of the island without power. Authorities say they are hoping to restore service Monday or Tuesday, and neighbouring countries have offered emergency help, but a hurricane passed over Cuba on Sunday, which is bound to delay recovery efforts.
One shudders to imagine the effects on the food security of an already half-starved nation: the Associated Press reports that Cubans were taking to the streets in the darkness to cook the contents of suddenly useless refrigerators. Cuba is actually quite well-equipped with (lousy) refrigerators thanks to its past friendship with nominally communist China, as the Financial Times mentioned in an Oct. 13 article now making the social media rounds with renewed urgency.
Cuba’s socialist revolution has always counted heavily on charity from other countries aligned against the United States, and, as has happened in the past, it is now caught in an awkward corner. Most of Cuba's electrical generation comes from imported fossil fuels, but Russia is tied up in a land war, Venezuela is a basket case and China … well, China, as it turns out, just doesn’t believe very much in charity. (In any event, the issues with Cuban power generation sound more like communist physical-plant troubles than communist fuel shortages.) The trade relationship between the two countries is collapsing fast; Cuba has enormous unpaid debts to key Chinese companies; and an important Chinese deal for exported Cuban sugar has been abandoned because Cuba now hardly produces enough sugar for its own needs.
The new wrinkle is that China hardly feels the need for another geo-strategic toehold in the Western Hemisphere, even if it could afford to underwrite the survival of the Cuban regime. China has economic alliances and infrastructure ownership all over South America, to say nothing of what might be going on next door to you or I in Canada. But the Chinese sages are willing to provide advice if nothing else, according to FT’s Ed Augustin:
“China publicly supports Cuba’s right to choose its own path to economic development ‘in line with its national conditions,’ but privately Chinese officials have long urged the Cuban leadership to shift from its vertically planned economy to something closer to the Chinese model, according to economists and diplomats briefed on the situation. Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership’s unwillingness to decisively implement a market-oriented reform programme despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo, the people said.”
Those words are the reason for the sudden virality of Augustin’s piece. Anyone who knows even as much about Cuba as we’ve written here must wonder why Cuba never adopted Dengism
— Colby Cosh