14ymedio, Jorge Hernández Fonseca, 22 May 2019 — After brilliant demonstrations as a wise opponent, Juan Guaidó has fallen into the trap he always claimed to reject: authorizing talks with Maduro. The reason: there is a new factor now at play in the equation, Castro’s Cuba.
According to press reports, the Oslo talks were initially suggested by Havana. Hence the danger of having planned a solution on the island that is akin to their interests, even if it means Havana has to deliver some piece of the complex chess game that is being played in Caracas. Maduro would be sacrificed.
Since the failed negotiations of the Venezuelan opposition with senior leaders of the Madurista dictatorship, it was already more or less clear that Havana’s plans of Havana could involve the exchange of Maduro for General Padrino. Behind the idea of General Padrino’s leadership as a condition for the transitional government was Cuban intelligence, trying to control the process and placing one of its best men to lead the changes towards “democracy.” This is a scheme Castroism already tried before in Nicaragua.
This most likely signifies that the opposition has received guarantees of putting in a relief player for Maduro in exchange for a transitional government plus elections, as Guaidó demands, but leaving intact the army led by Padrino and the party led by Diosdado Cabello.
This would be followed by elections that Castroism would be willing to lose, at the beginning (recalling Violeta Chamorro’s 1990 victory in Nicaragua), but would ensure a continuation of oil for Cuba and as well as of the Chavista scheme in Venezuela, incubating and waiting.
The scheme that Castroism promotes for Venezuela could now satisfy US requests that “Cuba send home its military,” and Cubans may suggest to the Americans a solution for the island similar to the Venezuelan one. It would withdraw from its 20,000 men from the country (almost all doctors) but leave intact the Cuban system of counterintelligence planted in the Venezuelan Army headed by Padrino. Within the Island, the process would continue without political changes and without elections, but with certain capitalist guarantees in the economy. Would the United States accept this?
There will be no democratic solution in Venezuela — nor in Cuba — that does not involve rooting out the Castroist ideology, something that the current Venezuelan opposition apparently is not very aware of when it demonstrates against against a military solution, although this would be the only way to completely “clean” the Venezuelan and Cuban Marxist panorama.
Nicaragua bears witness to the mistake of having allowed a half-way solution, leaving behind a party and a Marxist army, ever ready to return.
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