Cuba’s surviving Trump’s oil embargo with solar powered tuk-tuks

Anyone who’s spent a lot of time in second-or third-world nations will tell you that tuk-tuks are definitely a thing. They’re inexpensive to operate, compared to a car or truck, and serve in almost every capacity that you can imagine. From colectivos where public transport isn’t available to makeshift dump trucks hauling supplies to a construction site. Right now, thanks to the Orange Skidmark’s murderous gas and oil embargo on Cuba, tuk-tuks are filling a vital role, replacing vehicles for first responders and much-needed transportation for goods, services, and the free movement of the public.

Cuba’s iconic vintage cars have all but disappeared and in their place, small electric tricycles — most of them made in China — have become the primary means of transportation for hundreds of thousands of Cubans grappling with a prolonged fuel crisis.

These are no ordinary electric tricycles — many Cubans have outfitted them with solar panels, allowing the vehicles to recharge without relying on the island nation’s strained power grid.

While their price is out of reach for most Cubans, many have sold their older gasoline-powered cars to buy the tricycles. Others got them from relatives abroad, where they are generally cheaper, and some small-business owners even used their profits to invest in them, expecting to recoup the cost

So, to be clear, the fact that Trump’s foreign policy has had it so that only a single tanker full of oil has made it into Cuban territory since January has driven Cubans to not only lessen their dependency on oil imports, but has also pushed the nation further into the arms of China, America’s primary soft power competitor in South and Central America.

A lack of comfort and necessities in a nation that has seldom had enough of anything won’t make the people who live there crack. They’ll certainly suffer. But they’ll make do and they adapt. But they’ll also remember who it was that took what little they had.