Cuba’s Silent Collapse

Cuba's collapse is quiet but dangerous. Cuba is running out of time and out of power. Once a regional symbol of defiance, the island now faces rolling blackouts, a collapsing currency, and an exodus of its best minds. Entire cities go dark for hours each day. The peso has fallen to 400 per US dollar on the street, and most workers earn less than $20 a month. Let me say that again. In socialist, communist Cuba, whatever you want to call it, most workers earn less than $20 a month. Doctors, engineers, and students are fleeing. Two million Cubans, nearly one fifth of the population, have left in just four years. The sugar industry, once Cuba's pride, has all but vanished. Venezuela, Cuba's longtime patron, can no longer ship enough oil to keep the lights on. Cuban dissident Oscar Bisquet told the Hill. Now, as both economies crumble, Washington faces a new question. What happens when a failed state sits just 90 miles from Florida? Okay, what's the real message here? Cuba is crumbling. We might see millions of Cubans flee on boats, rafts, old tires, trying to get any place other than Cuba. And the irony, of course, is when we see this collapse of socialism in front of us in our own Washington, D.C. we see socialism as the dominant policy, buying stakes in intel, telling US Steel what to do, trying to extort companies, saying, give me a piece of this. Do we really want to become the next Cuba? Because I don't think we can all flee to Cuba. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. So Cuba is nobody's idea of a paradise for the last 60 years. I mean, the image I had just growing up as a kid in the 70s was everybody in Cuba was going around in 1957 Chevrolets because they couldn't get any new cars and the economy was so poor. But it's gotten worse and worse and worse now. For a long time, they could be propped up by the Soviet Union. Well, that's gone. They had strong alliances with socialists in Venezuela. Well, Venezuela is a basket case. So this could be a real, real problem. And it's very fine for the United States to lecture Europe. Oh, you got to get control of your borders. And shame on you for letting Syrians fleeing death coming into your country? It's easy to say that for some, but what are we going to do if all of a sudden there are essentially millions of Cubans starving to death, fleeing the country, building any kind of sailboat, powerboat, a raft with chicken wire and tires, floating to the nearest coast of another country, which, in case your geography is a little rusty, is Florida, and the United States. I can tell you some 25, 30 years ago, I remember walking down the beach in St. Augustine. This is north Florida, walking along the beach, and there was a raft clearly from Cuba. It looked like it had a couple of old doors, plywood, it had chicken wire, and it had old tires. And the raft made it to the shores of the United States. People did not. They died. Because these can be treacherous waters with currents between Cuba and Florida only 90 miles apart. Their sugar harvest has plunged below 200,000 tons per year. Tourism is dropping. Part of that is policies by the United States to make it much more difficult. I mean, I've traveled to 50 countries in the world, worked in 45. I've never been to Cuba, even though I lived 90 miles away. I probably only live 120 miles away now. It's not easy to get there. And dissidents are describing Cuba and Venezuela as twin dictatorships. Dictatorships don't really work very well in the long run for the economy. So those of you trying to embrace a certain dictator in America now saying, you know, we need a dictator now, maybe you want to check out Cuba now. There's been a lot of hand wringing lately in America about the rise of socialism. And in fact, indeed there is a candidate for mayor of New York City who calls himself a democratic socialist. This is a term that confuses a lot of people. And he said things like, he would like to have free busing. And that has caused shock and horror with a lot of people, the very same people who are shocked and horrified at Zoran Mamdani, the democratic socialist candidate and likely to be the next mayor of New York City, as far as I can tell. I think it's perfectly fine for our administration in Washington not to just talk about something free, but to actually socialize large chunks of our biggest industries. To have the government picking winners and losers, to have the government saying, I want 10% of intel. I'm going to tell U.S. steel what they can call themselves. I'm going to take pieces of smaller companies. I'm going to have a deal for me. I'm going to put together who can own TikTok, as long as it's my buddies who share my same political values. So, folks, this is exactly what dictatorships do. It's what destroyed the early economy of Russia as it broke away. It had a chance. It had a little window there for a while after they threw off the shackles of the Soviet Union and communism. But they quickly devolved into dictatorship, where it was about crony capitalism and unfortunately, the difference between crony capitalism and socialism, it gets smaller every day. One sort of morphs into the other. So if you don't want the United States to become the next Cuba, my urging to you is focus on real. Where the real socialism is actually being implemented. The mayor of New York City cannot single handedly nationalize the entire Wall street industry. Not going to happen in a million years. But what we are seeing now is the power of the White House is in fact nationalizing parts for all the entire industry. And if you are like I am and you're not a fan of socialism, that's where you should focus. If you actually look at the policies of Mamdani, they're pretty mild and intrepid. Now, I have not endorsed him on this show, but one of the things that has gotten him so much vitriol is he's offering to give people free buses across town. Like that's going to be the end of the world instead of paying the, I don't know, two bucks to get on. You know who else did this? Who gave free transportation to citizens of New York for a major leg of public transportation? Republican Rudy Giuliani. That's right. He, he turned the Staten Island Ferry, which you had to pay for during his term, and he said it's going to be free for everyone. Somehow I don't remember everyone saying Giuliani is the worst socialist in the world. He's going to destroy New York and we all have to move out of New York. I don't remember that happening. In fact, New York was, you know, crime was much higher in the 90s during Giuliani's term. But it was headed in the right way. The city got cleaner every day, which is in fact why I voted for him for reelection when he ran for reelection in the late 1990s. So let's keep this in mind. To clarify, to sum up socialism bad point two, look at what people do if they're actually socializing industries and have the power to have government take over huge swaths of the private sector. That's what you need to focus on. Not somebody creating one grocery store in a community that no one can get to any other grocery store in less than a half an hour. So let's, let's focus on real issues, friends. Socialism is a real problem. It does not have a good track record of creating wealth and prosperity for most citizens. Now the other thing people got to grow up about is, is I realize this is complicated and it sounds a bit muddled, but there is just a huge difference between socialism and democratic socialism, which is what half of Western Europe and Scandinavia is. And they have thriving, thriving capitalistic systems. But they have a little more of a welfare net than we do, a little better, a lot better health care system than we do. But they still keep most of their economy in the private check.