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Hi! I’m a leftist who helped install a water purification system in Cuba & work regularly with a network that has installed upwards of 100 systems there. The reason they don’t have clean water is because the embargo makes it nearly impossible to get the supplies to build systems.
After the tornado in Havana, which tore up some of the municipal pumping structures, the government immediately sent fire trucks filled with water to a couple of our purification stations so they could continue to provide clean water to their surrounding communities.
We’d love to install water purification systems in places like Flint, poisoned by a corrupt local government, but none of the filtration systems we use (reverse osmosis, ozone, and UV) takes out heavy metals, only biological contaminants.
There are churches in Appalachia that have offered to host systems for their surrounding communities, who lack municipal sources, but American law, written by corporations which benefit from bottled water sales, doesn’t allow muni distribution from a non-muni source.
Anyway, still lots of stuff that’s very bad about the Cuban regime, as well as lots of stuff that’s very bad about ours. That does not mean that a better world isn’t possible for all of us.
Also, re: crumbling infrastructure: New Orleans has worse roads than Havana (we all remarked on it immediately when we got home) and loses power approximately as often. There are also neighborhoods in NOLA in which it is as difficult to buy food as it is in Cuba. 🤷🏻♀️
We successfully drove around rural Cuba in this bus. I don’t think it’d make it through most of the Lower Ninth Ward. 
I do not in any way want to lionize the regime. Clearly, people are suffering. But people are suffering here, as well.
Also, the regime being bad doesn’t mean the embargo makes a goddamn lick of sense. We do plenty of business with regimes who are far more violent and dangerous. Shit, we do plenty of business FOR regimes who are far more violent and dangerous.
Blockades cause the regular people to suffer, not those who control the resources. Duh. Like... duh. Come on.
