Speaking from England:
Firstly, if you believe everything you hear from the BBC, then I have several bridges to sell you. Propaganda central, patronising, gaslighting and suppressing dissent, is their stock in trade. You need to get out a bit more.
Second, if they can't get spare parts, why don't they just copy and make them themselves. Are they helpless, or what ?. Perhaps good old mother Russia will help them.
Chris
Man on train : Don't take that tone with me, young man. I fought the war for your sort!
Ringo : I bet you're sorry you won..
Amateurs. The New York Times does all that far better.
The world is full of machine shops. Especially China. I must get a bad-english email a day from a chinese shop of some sort.
I suppose Cuba once had machine shops.
Communists are people-people, social critters, and don't understand physical things, like cane mills. Or machine shops. They Seize The Means Of Production and let it rust.
Cuba imports sugar now. And exports talent.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Cubans are very good at maintaining cars without having original spares. The cars they run are very old and amazing. Any tourist visiting there can see this. If they don't repair other machines it is because they really can't.
The people who maintain the cars are individuals trying to make a dollar from tourists.
The decaying sugar mills are owned by The Party.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
It probably still does. They may not be able to import the alloys they'd need to machine to make the missing parts, or the alloys to make the cutting heads to machine them.
John Larkin has never heard of the T-34 tank. Or the AK-47 assault rifle.
I'll bet he's heard of Stalin, Beria, Molotov and the Gulag Archipelago, though.
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