cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/50636966
President Trump has tried to strangle Cuba by blocking its oil imports. But six months later, the island is finding ways to endure.
“We have not reached the point of having a humanitarian crisis precisely because of the strength of our society,” Mr. Fernández de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said in Havana’s Fidel Castro museum, where the lights were on but the air-conditioning had failed. “The intimate expectation in political circles in the United States was that Cuba could not survive beyond April. And here we are.”
July 27, 2026
Definitely not the ideal way to implement a transition off of oil but inspiring nonetheless.
I do wonder why Cuba didn’t make greater efforts to turn to solar in years past. If they had, they could have avoided some, though probably not all, of this pain.
I imagine that it wasn’t about will but more about having a neighbor making life hard for them to trade for decades
Obviously a factor but the article notes a huge rollout over the past year. So it seems like that could have started previously. It’s not like the US has stopped interfering.
My uneducated take :
The US is turning against pretty much every allies they have.
China sees this and swoop in with human aid where it’s needed, creating an influence there for future favors.
China is the factory of the world and a military super power. They see the US burning their ammo in Iran and Russia has shown that they were not that great of a power to begin with. China can get cheap resources from countries they helped.
So China is simply setting itself as the next world super power since Trump has made sure that the US is losing influence pretty much with everyone.