Ahh, I see the problem - you think that the oil oligarchy wants that battery plant to be completed (as opposed to “completely finished”)… 
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An earlier book - Isaac’s Storm by Eric Larson (2000) - mentioned these same issues. At that time, Cuba was probably well ahead of the US, but jingoism meant that we ignored them.
From Chapter 1:
For days, however, Isaac had been receiving cables from the Weather Bureau’s Central Office in Washington describing a storm apparently of tropical origin that had drenched Cuba. Although Isaac did not know it, there was confusion about the storm’s true course, debate as to its character. The bureau’s men in Cuba said the storm was nothing to worry about; Cuba’s own weather observers, who had pioneered hurricane detection, disagreed. Conflict between both groups had grown increasingly intense, an effect of the unending campaign of Willis Moore, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, to exert ever more centralized control over forecasting and the issuance of storm warnings.
The audio book got me through a long car trip.
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Thanks for sharing that very informative article!
(I’m not sure where your $700K figure came from, as the article says, “Property damage at the time was estimated to be $30 million; in today’s dollars, that’s more than $700 million….”)
Regardless, I had no idea that anyone had developed such a sophisticated and accurate prediction system way back then and I’d guarantee that a good part of the rejection of the Cuban’s system is the exact same “only white people can know/do anything” that we’re seeing all over again in Washington DC (and elsewhere) today. 
And the results are going to be just as deadly if not more so. 
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That was part of the issue. I can’t find the article now, but this all started when locals were complaining that Hyundai wasn’t fulfilling its promise to hire locally - they were bringing in hundreds of construction workers from South Korea. There is a visa that allows them to be in the US for 90 days for business, but I believe they exceeded that.
Hyundai had said they would bring in people to train local workers but by farming everything out to “subcontractors” absolved themselves of that responsibility. It was escalated to ICE/HS.
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My bad, corrected now. It was $700,000,000 in 2015 dollars, which is just under $1 billion in 2025 dollars.
Thanks for catching that.
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