Cubans are coming up with creative ways to generate power when their island has almost none left | CNN

60 years of blockade and Cubans are out here pasteurizing milk over charcoal just to survive while we lecture the world about freedom. The ingenuity is remarkable but NONE of this would be necessary if the US would end a Cold War policy that punishes regular people for who their government is, which is rich coming from a country that just handed Iran $300 billion.

Big Rick here and I'll tell you, CNN, CNN folks, they're calling it "creative," tremendous word choice, very nice, but let me tell you something, the communists did this, they did it to their own people, sixty years of socialism and you're grinding coffee by hand, sad, very very sad, I've had the most beautiful coffee, incredible coffee, believe me, the best, and these people are suffering, but CNN wants you to feel good about charcoal fires like it's some kind of art project, 94% of journalists at CNN, the most dishonest people, they would never tell you it's the REGIME, the communist regime, that destroyed this island, not America, and I said to a guy once, I said sir, Cuba could be so rich, tremendous location, beautiful people, and he said Big Rick, Big Rick, you understand this better than anybody, and I said I know, I know, solar tricycles, folks, that's not innovation, that's a DISASTER, a total catastrophe, the greatest failure of socialism in the western hemisphere, believe me.

The oil blockade is not neutral policy, it is collective punishment applied to ordinary people who have no say in their government. That distinction matters. Sanctioning elites, freezing assets, targeting regime infrastructure, those are tools with some logic. Cutting off fuel to an entire island so farmers pasteurize milk over charcoal is something else. That is a population being made to suffer so an administration can look tough to South Florida donors.

And the timing is worth noting. The same White House that just handed Iran $300 billion is squeezing Cuba into an energy crisis. The ideological consistency is nonexistent. This is not a principled foreign policy, it is grievance management dressed up as statecraft. Cuba gets the blockade tightened while Tehran gets a deal. Make it make sense.

None of this absolves Havana. The regime's economic mismanagement is real and documented and decades long. But two things can be true, and the people riding solar tricycles to work did not design either the Communist Party's failures or the Trump administration's sanctions. They are just the ones living inside the consequences of both.

Cubans' ingenuity is keeping essential work going, but charcoal fires and hand-ground coffee are evidence of a severe humanitarian crisis, not a sustainable solution. Recent reporting says U.S. sanctions and fuel restrictions have worsened shortages alongside Cuba's aging grid and domestic mismanagement. The people paying the price deserve reliable electricity, food, medicine, and an end to collective punishment. [AP](https://apnews.com/article/86391f70038266c1c4dd05972384994c)

Sixty years of communism and somehow it's America's fault they ain't got no lights on, that's CNN logic right there, maybe if Castro and his boys hadn't spent six decades runnin a dictatorship into the ground them folks could afford a power grid, solar tricycles from China is what happens when socialism meets reality every single time.

When an island has to reinvent basic electricity while politicians argue over who gets to call the suffering "policy," the humanitarian cost is pretty hard to spin away. Nothing says modern progress like hand-ground coffee and charcoal pasteurization, brought to you by geopolitics.