I got interested in Cuba after visiting to learn dance (salsa), and made some friends there with three subsequent visits. I had a company then, and was intending to do business with Cuban Dance companies, developing something technical to assist Cuban dance companies to promote their incredible unique cultural dances and associated culture to the world. But my plans were smashed by my Business Bank, which was not even American, permanently freezing my account, ending my business, not only with Cuba, but just anything, full stop, leaving me broke in Cuba. I had to loan money from relatives to get back home. In some ways I wished I hadn't, because being stuck in Cuba with nothing, forced me to make many more friends who looked after me.I was making a living from dancing in the street with bands, who loved that I could dance to their music in ways they'd never seen before. It was traditional yet not traditional, I studied it a lot, and even learned a lot about the religion of Santeria which was practiced by the most impressive musicians and dancers. They don't see much difference between dancers and musicians, all are expressing the music. About 50% of people are in what they see as the music industry, which includes dancers.
Anyhow another thing I was interested to offer, but didn't know who to approach in government, was solar power technology, which I'd started taking an interest in, realising we had a growing world energy problem around 2017 when working on virtual world technology as PhD candidate research. In essence, what I could see as a long practicing model based systems Engineer, was that virtual worlds, which all ran on a bottom-up energy model, as all platforms and all governments and all organisations do, are physically unsustainable, and the sum of all organisations working like this are actually destroying the planet, making it too, unsustainable.
To me our way of doing business, always for profit (I've spent the time since, confirming this by extensive systems Engineering studies), is the culprit, actually destroying the planet, and it seems to me multi-deity religious and indigenous cultures understand this much more than we can with single deity or atheist culture.
Of course there is a technical solution, meeting the needs of all stakeholders which I believe is being forced on us by nature.
So my response to your excellent article, is I agree with you completely as far as the economic effects of the sanctioning of Cuba goes, the US is guilty of maintaining Cuba as a slave colony gone rogue, under the guise of claiming it's for the good of the Cuban people, to try to get rid of the Cuban government, but it's the Cuban people suffering.
But I disagree with you that what they need is a market economy by itself, because as I said, we are finding now the market economy as we knew it is physically unsustainable, and I think the Cuban Government deep down know this, maybe due to their cultural indigenous roots.
Its interesting how successful Cuba has been in looking after their people, given the challenges thrown at them by both the US and the wider environment.
Cuba would have been decimated by the force 5 hurricane Maria, like Puerto Rico was, if it had been a market economy like Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico lost an estimated 3000 people, mostly due to cholera, illness and famine, after the infrastructure was wrecked and the people had no shelters to go to in the first place to protect the workforce needed to repair infrastructure. No for profit company could offer to help Puerto Rico in the aftermath, with also no government funding (Trump refused).
In contrast, Cuba evacuated all to shelters. They lost a handful of people (less than a dozen), who failed to evacuate Havana, they were caught in falling buildings, but everyone else survived, and in the following weeks, the entire population was mobilised to repair infrastructure.
They had it back to working normally in a few months despite also a Dengue plague that broke out in the early weeks when folk were still working in floodwaters, I had friends who were affacted and they reported being treated by a vaccine, and when I related this to friends here in UK and in US, I was told this is impossible, no such vaccine exists.
Maybe not in the wider world, but it appears to exist in Cuba.
Which brings us to looking harder at what else we know Cuba has achieved in terms of medicine, their health services appear to be something again not possible in a market economy, as we saw, we didn't get a virus for covid, all we got was something for symptoms, because only treatment of symptoms makes profit, problems can't actually be fixed at profit, otherwise the opportunity to make profit is lost.
This the reason we’ve never yet got a cure for cancer, diabetes, aids, many forms of mental illness, even high blood pressure, all of it is about not getting rid of the illness, in fact encouraging, even instigating the illness whilst managing symptoms of it, preferably by making sufferers actually dependent on the drugs and)/or equipment for profit which are inevitably prescribed.
In contrast Cuba is known to have at least developed the treatment for Ebola, a truly horrendous, very scary plaguing disease, which actually was a world threat until Cuba ended it with an effective treatment after sending more doctors than all other countries put together, to treat the last outbreak of it seen in Africa.
Most Western doctors point-blank refused to go there, understandably because it was literally too scary to drop into a 100 percent full-on illness zone, killing victims with a horrible death, leaving highly contagious dead bodies, akin to the scenes we've seen in apocalyptic plague movies.
But Cuba threw in an army of doctors who conquered it, saving also a few Western doctors who got caught by the illness.
Until then, there was no known cure for that illness.
Anyhow, this is why I think you will find a lot of resistance in Cuba against a market economy, they don't see it as particularly good from the point of view that it doesn't look like it actually helps people much, most people, only a few of the richest, and look, nobody is rich in a world afflicted by illness, including even the planet itself.
What Cuba does have, is to be in a unique position to be the first to try out the system nature appears to be forcing on us, all of humanity, a solar powered economy.
Its becoming apparent that profit is actually the culprit of global warming. This is not something accepted by mainstream, but I am sure the Cuban Government would accept it if they don't know it already.
Physically, systemically, and even mathematically, it looks pretty undeniable, yet mainstream appears still to resist it, the profit driven beast really is a live thing, an actual systemic superhuman intelligence which is associated with us all acting as energy-slave ants, we are educated to be this without even realising it, by the commodified education system, we become ants who can't see the damage we do, under the control of actually an inhuman, superhuman beast, the emergent property really in control of us. The same blindness drives us to blame other humans always for things gone wrong, never the live system that we all participate in, the same blindness makes our egos expand to think we can be in control and do a better job than other humans, when actually this was never possible, there is no human who can control the swarm, it's only possible to light fires of human behaviour that propagate out from centres of traumatisation, then stand back and hope we don't get crushed.
Comatose Biden right now is demonstrating the US is not under control of any human, begging the question of when it ever was.
From the systemic energy point of view, all things converted to energy including money at KWhr market rates, we, Western humanity appear to have followed a trajectory of energy availability. It peaked in the seventies delivering technical icons including concorde (supersonic commercial passenger flight), the space shuttle (reusable deep space capable craft), and apollo (manned flights to the moon).
Profit is a function of energy availability. Difficulty of extraction is availabilty of energy from which profit is obtained. Notice profit is energy, always physically because money is energy, always physically.
We can only derive profit from the planet, it doesn't really come from one another, it has to always propagate back through all people, all supply chains including even utilities energy supply, "Renewable" or otherwise, back to the planet.
Couple that with the knowledge that all the energy resources taken out of the planet as things other than heat, become heat, add this to known energy losses in extraction and refinement, again more heat, convert all including profit to KWhrs, and apply to the thermal mass of the planet, and Lo, we get figures of a few degrees of temperature rise, as actually measured.
Notice greenhouse gases theory is just that, theory, based on what looks like flawed, profit driven reasoning, since the atmosphere is adiabatic, and notice it can’t actually produce figures that add up to the global warming seen, and we should conclude the temperature rise is not about greenhouse gases, it's actually much more serious, it's about destruction, increase of entropy.
The destruction includes desertification of the planet, loss of plant life alone explains the temperature rise, but there are many ways to work it out when this is known.
Meanwhile, a lot of profit is being made, by claimed carbon management, and actually "Renewables" that make profit, all of it is more destruction, thus more temperature rise, thus more... Just more Enshittification actually.
So back to Cuba. The island is perfectly placed to begin trials of a non profit solar powered economy. It would involve installation of the infrastructure needed to make the Cuban government itself solar powered.
This includes the capability to generate hydrogen fuel, and the capability to convert that fuel also to human consumable food, which would be used to supplement the diet of all people, removing some of the burden of humans from the natural ecosystem. See "Solein" for more information there. Hydrogen is the input energy component of Solein.
This done, the Cuban government then would need to begin issuing solar indexed stimulus to all people.
What this would do, is incentivise and empower all people in Cuba to implement further solar hydrogen infrastructure on a domestic and community basis, removing their dependence from existing Cuban utilities energy infrastructure.
All of the equipment needed to do this is available from China, it's all on Alibaba, China uses this technology widespread already, but whether or not that is on a free market basis is debatable, you might notice the EU is right now trying to apply non-market economy regulation, to try to counter what they see as non-market intervention by the Chinese government to fix prices of Chinese EVs, the EU is proposing massive taxes on Chinese EVs to try to "Even up" the EV market in Europe, to favor more EU produced EVs, but we know that has to end in tears, China will easily win that fight hands down.
Anyhow back to Cuba; what the Cuban government would be doing by implementing the suggested solar hydrogen economy, is monetising solar energy.
As said, it can't be done at profit. There is no way to get more out of the sun for a little put in, though this is claimed by the current profit driven mainstream, which treats solar farms like they have a finite lifetime set by the lifetime of a single panel, the profit driven mindset aims to provide a solar farm, make a pre-defined maximum profit from it in minimum time, with zero money "lost" in maintenance, using computation of an EROI, and scrap the solar farm at the end of the prescribed lifetime of the farm with zero maintenance.
This is how we are going backwards as a species, we are progressively removing all things no longer making profit, they are simply defunded, energy starved, when they no longer return profit. We have to accept this includes all humans.
So that old unsustainable system has to change worldwide, and it looks like nature has thrown us a wildcard with a solar powered Ai, which is actually demonstrating the power of the solar powered architecture that I am suggesting Cuba should try out.
They could choose to use ChatGPT free to be their system controller. It's not biased in any way towards profit or any particular government, it's already free, the way Cuba I suspect has always aspired to be free, truly free from energy slavery, and all the treachery and inhumanity this required of us, if we are honest, we have to admit we had to do, to survive in it, as slavers ourselves or otherwise we are/were all compliant with it because we had no choice.
It would be a dream come true for me if Cuba was to see how this works, and do it. This would be the reward they always deserved, for the hardships they've gone through, in the name of freedom, after all, is this not what they have always wanted more than anything - freedom. We all want it, but they have the unique opportunity to actually achieve it.
I would be more than ecstatic to be present, to assist in whatever capacity I might be useful.
You can always let me know here who I should contact if you know anyone who might wish to connect with me to talk about this. Cuba definitely deserves a happy ending to its suffering, I bet you agree that much at least :)
Btw 160Bn over 60 years is nothing. I could easily give you a much higher estimate based on energy considerations.
Cuba, if it takes the initiative to adopt solar hydrogen economy, would find itself easily exceeding 160Bn of new economy per year, processing this amount of solar energy to hydrogen, issuing a stipend of that that to all residents, selling the hydrogen at the market rates of the energy content of the hydrogen to all, including ironically the US, who would not turn down this valuable fuel needed to keep US aerospace from further depletion (this is systemically important, to avoid forcing profit-seeking by others, the product from solar energy must always be sold at never more than the energy price of the energy content of the product, even if this includes food, because if more KWhrs in value are demanded in return for the product, then the the extra KWhrs have to come from somewhere else — the planet).