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Hurricane Fidel Has Been Cuba’s Worst Disaster [Marco Rubio]

While New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is in Cuba this week learning about natural-disaster preparedness from the Castro regime, he should use the opportunity to hold the government’s feet to the fire for the manmade disaster it has imposed on the Cuban people for five decades.

In Cuba, it doesn’t take a hurricane to cause power outages; government rationing of electricity has been doing that for some time. The destruction of the agricultural economy didn't begin when storms destroyed crops; it began when the regime took control of the means of production. The country's infrastructure didn’t start crumbling because of hurricane-strength winds; it’s been deteriorating for decades, along with many aspects of Cuban life, because of a regime obsessed with using its limited resources to maintain power, deprive its people of fundamental liberties and close itself off from the free world.

But perhaps the worst part about the regime’s hurricane-mitigation program is its routine, cruel, and inhumane rejection of American aid.

If Mayor Nagin is in Cuba learning about the regime’s hurricane-response efforts, he shouldn’t be surprised to discover that the worst disaster in Cuba’s history has been a manmade one called Hurricane Fidel.

— Marco Rubio is a Republican running for the U.S. Senate in Florida.