I am joined by a woman who was born in Cuba, emigrated to the United States about twenty four years ago, twenty two, twenty three years ago. And Meelan Salabaria is with me now to talk about a column she just did about the lights in Cuba. And Meelane, first of all, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here with you and your audience. Thank you for the invitation.
So I want to kind.
Of start with your life story before we get into what's happening now in Cuba. How old were you when you left Cuba and tell me about that. How did you come to the United States.
I came to the United States in two thousand and one, so I left Cuba as a adult shortly after I graduated from law school in the University in Havana. Literally waited a couple of weeks to get the equivalent of my transcripts and my diploma never registered with what would be the equivalent of the war.
Here in the United States.
Otherwise I will have been set in a stone in a government database and they will have never allowed me to leave. Back then, we still have the Cuban Adjustment Act, so we could come as refugees and have a legal path with certain requirements until I became an American citizen in two thousand and nine. So yes, I was born and raised in communist Cuba while field culture was still in power. So trust me, there is nothing about the wonders of socialism quote unquote.
That I have lived on my own life personally.
And I think one of the reasons that I'm happy you're coming on to talk about this is because Cuba is currently in a really bad situation.
But this is the normal.
End result of socialism. So tell me what is happening on the island right now.
It's very simple.
It is this is like the last chapter of any econ one on one book that you can read onto why centralized economy, collectivism and socialism doesn't work.
And yes, you can have all the talking heads of the world telling you that it's the fault of the.
Embargo or whatever is the few restrictions of the helm Board and Act.
That we still have in place, which are not many.
That reality is not that the Cuban government has been consistently receiving a lot of money from other sources and trading and doing business with the rest of the world.
E said that with.
The United States, they have to pay in cash, and still they haven't prioritized what really needs to be done in the infrastructure of the country. And the collapse of the power grid is just the latest example of a whole line of neglect and mismanagement that again has the root cause in a centralized economy that doesn't work. To go back into some of the details that I had restent that article that you were mentioned earlier, this.
Happened about two weeks ago.
It was like a total collapse of the entire power grid on the island. There is no amount of cheap oil crude oil from Venezuela or chips that the new president of Mexico and to Cuba that is going to fix that. Why because the infrastructure is crumbling, and its crumbling because the Cuban government and the Communist Party has made a deliberate decision to prioritize other things. For example, I don't know how familiar you are or your audience is with the way that the tourism system and industry
works in Cuba. It's basically on and operated by conglomerate, a government monopoly called Gaza, which is a front company for the higher needs of a military. So this is a company that is run and operated by the Quban army. We are talking about that seventy percent of the revenue that inter Cuba through tourism is controlled by this company.
What are they doing with the money they are reinvesting in.
Hotels and spending in more tourist infrastructure. Are they being demonstrated the low capacity instead of prioritizing critical infrastructure improvement and development Like the case of the power grid, all the power plants operated in QBA are thirty years or old, if not more.
They all have really all technology. They have a huge.
Exodus professionals that are supposed to be working on that. So here you have like a critical point, like a perfose form of all their mistakes, just meeting in the same place it happened last about two weeks ago. They kind of stabilize it a little bit, and now in the last three days they're collapsing again when they tried to bring two of the powers into the national grid.
So we're back to the same position we were two weeks.
Ago, and literally people have no internet, they have no power, They none of the septic or none of the sewers working. Oh, so people have been thrust into the dark ages and what should be a functioning economy. And I think part of this, and I want to ask your opinion about this, is this because Cuba has been being propped up for decades now by Venezuela, by Russia. They send money, they
send oil, they send cheap goods and stuff like that. Well, now Venezuela has collapsed inevitably as they were going to. And now Russia is busy in redirecting all of their energy and resources to the war in Ukraine.
So is this exacerbated? It made it worse.
It is exactly what you are describing. You have to keep in mind that.
Since Castro took over, Cuba has never been a self sustainable economy. First it was a direct pipeline from the Soviet Union and all the communist countries in Eastern Europe. When that got caught off when the Berlin Wall fell, then they went into latching into Venezuela.
Where Child's and Malua we're in there.
Now Venezuela has been following into the same disaster that happened.
To Cuba a little bit faster.
And now that pipeline is also caught off and then you have like the little key from China, little here from Mexico, little hear from Russia, and still is not enough. Why because the foundation of the economy of the country
is in crumbles. Just to give you a quick example, this is something that we learn through a dissident reporting from Cuba about a year ago, and is that putting and the Russian government has given the Cuban government a very good term loan of close to one to put to one point two billion euros I believe, and it was ear mark specifically for a power infrastructure improvement and
to build and rebuild and repair new power plants. The only condition that put input on the Cuban government was that they needed to come up with ten percent of that money as a down payment. They didn't do it, and the high ideal through why it fell through because the equivalent money that would have matched that ten percent man did they decided to use it into They keep building hotels, they keep building these tours, resources, all these tours.
Infrastructure is still empty, and that's where they are prioritizing investing the little money that they're getting in the country.
That's why when I was writing that piece, I.
Was referring to, you know, the second twisted priorities. Somebody has to pay for the rolicxs that the canels wears. Somebody has to pay for the Gucci bags and the shoes that his wife is touting all over the world, where regular women and people.
In Cube are literally starving.
So and like you were saying before, the collapse of the power grid includes a series of connecting effects that made the daily life for the other Cuban even worse than they are that they were before. You have to keep in mind I left in two thousand and one and living with the scheduled blackouts was my normal life for the twenty seven years that I was in Cuba, so that has always been the quote unquote normal. So now you have these areas, especially in the rural areas,
they always try to prioritize the capitol. And still in the last two days even the capital has been in total blackout. Last news that I read this morning, some neighborhoods in the outscirts of Havana have been without power for ninety hours. So, like you were saying, you don't have running water, the source system is collapsed, you don't
have internet. However, all the tourist hotels, resources, all the buildings of the higher elits of the army body, you know, officials, the neighborhoods where the embassies are, all those peoples.
They never know what a blackout is.
We have to see, you know, we have to see the priorities, like everybody is equal, but some people are more equal than others exactly.
And I was, oh, go ahead.
And what happened that is a little bit different in this last week and when the set bround of this collapse happened, is that it hit really bad these supurban working class neighborhoods in Havana, and anyone that can go to Twitter or ex can see how people I don't know how they have been charging the phones or putting out the little life out in the Internet. People are starting to bang in pots and pants as a form of protest because of.
How many hours they have been without power.
Now to add insult to injury, you have people in Cuba that have you know, they have gone to the offices of the local municipalities, the local government to ask for an answer, what's happening, what's the plan?
When is this going to be solved. They're obviously being given all this, you.
Know, which you watching responses, and then you have the cannel, which is the aun elected you know, appointed here of the Castros plantation that is now acting as a president, coming into the news yesterday and saying, well, this is just like a hay campaign and fake news being put out on the internet by the ego ynkeys people that hate us, and we are here where there are being of revolutionarily some blah blah blah, not one sentence about Okay, what are you doing to fix the power?
Great problem? And on top of.
That, then they're sending out the brown chers, the political police, the black wis, which is what would be the equivalent of the swat teams in the police here in the United States.
They're sending them now.
To those neighborhoods that have been without power for ninety hours because people there to bang their pots and pants as.
A form of protest.
I was talking to a young person not so long ago, and he said, I don't understand why the Cuban people or in We started out talking about Venezuela, and then I turned to the Cuban people. He said, I don't understand why they don't you rise up? And I'm like, well, they don't have any weapons. That's the first thing, because zach Castro, you know, in order to promote safety, took away all the guns and now they're reduced to pots
and pants the streets. I want to ask you, Mayleen, because I love to travel and a friend of mine was going to Cuba and I said, I am not going to give Cuba any of my money. And you just confirmed what I have been told, and that is while the hotels and the tourist district they have full restaurants, they have everything they need. Regular Cuban people can't get bell peppers, they can't get onions, they can't get the basic staples to eat because they're bleeding them dry. But
I want to ask you this one question. Is this like a last gasp attempt by the regime to create any kind of economy. And if they did create any kind of decent tourism economy, do you have any confidence that the people of Cuba would benefit from that in any significant way?
Absolutely not, absolutely not.
What guy is this military conglomery in Cua have been doing with tourists since they were lean Wolf felled down. It's not to improve the economy of the country. It's for them to enrich themselves. That's why they live like the pigs in animal farm. That's why they have all their kids buying properties abroad everywhere in Spain, in South America, and that's why they're you know, laundering the money and taking it out of Cuba.
They have never given a.
Flying rat about you know, the economy of the country or the welfare of the Cuban people. Otherwise they will have shown some acts or some you know, actual measurable outcome after sixty five years. So I have absolutely no confident in that they are. That's the propaganda that they want to put out for the rest of the world.
Obviously, and clearly we have.
Like like they them self defined masses of useful idiots, not only in the United States but all over the work eating completely all that propaganda. But I have no confidence that they're doing that for the Cuban people. They don't care about the country's economy, They don't care about the other's Cuban They only care about themselves, how they live, and how they keep lining their pockets with more money.
Melan. Every time something catastrophic happens in Cuba, I think to myself, this could be the thing.
This could be the breaking point where.
The Cuban people rise up and unarmed rush the rush the capitol and do something.
Well, how bad does it have to get?
I mean, we see what happened in Venezuela where people were literally starving, and they still have the regime in place in Venezuela.
What has to happen?
Do you think before we get on a significant regime?
Don't know? Yeah, honestly, I think it's gonna have It's I was talking with a friend of mine, also Cuban American, and he left.
He's an older generation.
That means obviously his parents took him out of Cuba when he was younger, and he told me something that god, you know, got stuck in my head because I never thought about it from that angle, And is that the generations of Cubans that had any fire left inside they're dead?
Yeah, they're gone.
I mean you have to understand by the time that I was born, that Cuba that was before nineteen fifty nine, or that Cuba of that first generation that is still fought when they realized what Caustle was really trying to impose is gone.
That Cuba was already gone by the time that I was born. So here we have another.
You know, political science and equal one on one lesson, and what happens when now you're dealing with three or four generations of Cubans born, raised and brainwashed under this system that tells you that firearms are bad, that that is stas the one that is going to take care of you, that everybody's equal again until you realize that some people are more equal than others. So I think it's going to take a longer process. It's going to
take a longer awaken it. That being said, there is a lot of courageous people in Cuba literally inside the monster, speaking out, reporting the things in jail, protesting.
Being made up, you name it.
But I think that the fact that it's now an entire society with several generations that don't know how it was before, is gonna make that process harder. Like you mentioned the fact that the first thing that Castro did when he took over was, you know, taking away all the firearms the island per se geographically speaking, as a present, you don't have borders, you don't have a way to get help from anyone else unless someone consciously, you know, it's really invested.
In helping the people inside.
Clearly the change is gonna come from within, but I think it's gonna take time, probably onto all this cloud elite of the old you know, revolutionaries from those years.
We feel that castro dye and seeing what happens with the new one.
I mean, it would be a sweet irony if it would be blackouts on the darkness what definitely, finally, once and for all, brings that tyranny down.
I love Cuban culture, I love Cuban food, I love Cuban music, I love Cuban people. I want that island to be free because I'd like to be able to go visit it in good conscience before I die. So here's here's my little prayer that Cuba gets it gets it together. Maelan Salabaria, thank you so much for your time today and the great article of it.
Yeah, that everybody should share with their.
Young people who think that socialism is a viable system.
Maylan, thank you so much. We'll talk again in the future, I'm sure.
Okay, thank you, all right, thank you.
That is Maelan Salabaria