By Mary Anastasia O’Grady | Wall Street Journal

Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike inflicted misery on millions of Cubans. But when the Castro dictatorship looks at the devastation, it sees opportunity.

Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who took over as head of state in February, for years have been calling for an end to the U.S. embargo, which they say is starving Cuba. But Cuba can already buy from U.S. producers all the food and medicine it can pay cash for. What the totalitarian tag-team really wants is an end to the ban on private-sector credit to the Cuban government.

Their demand has gone nowhere in Washington, both because of moral objections to doing business with tyrants, and because the Castro brothers are world-class deadbeats. They have defaulted on billions of dollars in debt to the rest of the world, and want credit from the “empire” (i.e., the U.S.) only because their options for borrowing elsewhere have narrowed significantly.

Now they are using the latest Cuban tragedy to ratchet up the pressure on Washington through the international press. Rather than accept an offer of $5 million in humanitarian assistance from the U.S., the regime is demanding that the credit ban be lifted. [Read more →]

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A street covered by electrical posts and cables after Hurricane Gustav. (Photo: AP)

Via AP:

Gustav howled into Cuba’s tobacco-growing western tip as a catastrophic Category 4 hurricane on Saturday while both Cubans and Americans on the Gulf Coast scrambled to flee the path of the fast-growing storm.

Forecasters said Gustav was just short of becoming a top-scale Category 5 hurricane as it hit Cuba’s mainland after passing over its Isla de la Juventud province, where screaming 150 mph winds toppled telephone poles, mango and almond trees and peeled back the tin roofs of homes.

Isla de la Juventud civil defense chief Ana Isla said there were “many people injured,” but no reports of deaths. She said nearly all its roads were washed out and that some regions were heavily flooded.

“It’s been very difficult here,” she said on state television.

Authorities evacuated at least 300,000 people across Cuba, including western communities, cities near Havana and on the Isla de la Juventud, or Isle of Youth, an island of 87,000 people south of mainland Cuba.

[...]

Cuba’s top meteorologist, Jose Rubiera, said the hurricane’s massive center made landfall in mainland Cuba near the community of Los Palacios in Pinar del Rio - a region that produces much of the tobacco used to make Cuba’s famed cigars.

There, the storm knocked down power lines, shattered windows and blew the roofs off some small homes.

Rubiera said the storm brought hurricane-force winds to much of the western part of Havana, where power was knocked out as winds blasted sheets of rain sideways though the streets and whipped angry waves against the famed seaside Malecón boulevard.

Felled tree branches and large chunks of muddy earth littered roads that were largely deserted overnight.

Cuba grounded all domestic flights and halted all buses and trains to and from Havana, where some shuttered stores had hand-scrawled “closed for evacuation” signs plastered to their doors.

Authorities boarded up banks, restaurants and hotels, and residents nailed bits of plywood to the windows and doors of their houses and apartments.

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