Cuba's Coming Collapse Could Be A Historic Catastrophe

Are We Prepared?

Cuba is about to collapse.

The country’s economy has been virtually non-functioning for years. That’s indicated by the pictures, placed below, which I took on a trip to the country in 2019.

It was Christmas, but there was almost nothing in the general stores to buy. Worse, people had to stand in long lines at food markets in order to get their hands on the few remaining potatoes and onions. Those markets were nestled in amid collapsing buildings and abandoned homes. On the adjoining streets were other lines of people. There ordinary Cubans queued up, glass-bottles in hand, waiting for the drinking water that they took from tanker trucks on the city streets.

Yet things are much worse now.

A building alongside the Havana harbor — the fanciest strip in the city.

An empty store in the old sugar town of Trinidad during Christmas in 2019.

Before the Revolution, the country was rich. In the 1930s, it had a higher per capita GDP than South Carolina. Americans sometimes emigrated to Cuba. But outright disaster is just around the corner. The mainstream media — so focused on how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are going about their business — are failing to report on a catastrophe that’s about to strike a country within 100 miles of the Florida Keys.

What will this mean? What plans does the Trump administration have to deal with this? We’re getting almost no information on these questions from our newspapers and TV news programs. It’s as though we had a month to prepare for a Richter Scale 10 earthquake set to befall a neighbor, but we’re too busy talking about the Oscars voting and the Superbowl to pay a shred of attention.