Beautiful Venezuela, so weighed down for such a long time with your own revolution. Is that what you wanted? No! That’s why we are going to save ourselves.
So much left wing higher education, so much nostalgia for Silvio Rodríguez and so many other dogs’ breakfasts of patriotic poetry, so much Castroism disguised as uncomfortable intellectualism, so many arms smuggled from Havana (the scroungers were previously the guerrillas), so much of our parents’ out of date Marxist social criticism. Is that what you wanted? No! That’s why we already saved ourselves.
Thanks, Venezuela.
Fidel Castro hates the Venezuelans as much as he hates Cubans a much as he hates human beings. Much more now, because he will die soon. And he hates the idea that millions and millions of people should live when he doesn’t.
The Venezuelans resisted Fidel too much, since January 1959 when the Commander in Chief proposed a diabolical pact to President Rómulo Betancourt: Venezuela will give Cuba all its oil and also its land as a trampoline for expanding the Revolution: in return, Fidel held out the promise of the destruction of the United States in a few years’ time and the damned imposition of the dream of Bolívar and Martí (he almost managed it in October 1962, at the cost of the Russian nuclear missiles, which showed that Bolívar and Martí, far from having dreams, had terrible nightmares).
Fidel tried military invasion of Venezuela several times. The continental consequences were negligible. No-one had any faith in his invasions. There were fabrications of Yankee imperialism and of national oligarchy. And the repressed people applauded that argument which seemed at the time to be conciliatory rather than totalitarian terrorism. Do you get it now, my dear Venezuela? Yes, I know, my strong and beloved little girl.
Also, it is possible that the Venezuelans felt a certain demoniacal left-wing pride at having been invaded time and again from the little island. You agree? Doesn’t matter.
Finally, when Fidel noticed that the world had changed, and that he had become older, he recruited thousands of Venezuelans, taught them his jargon of hate and thuggery, and he gave them the money to empower them (money which in fact came blood-soaked from Libya and Iran)
In this disgusting chess game, Rafael Caldera was the anonymous ally of Castroism, which cost many Venezuelan lives, including countless soldiers who were massacred in “accidents” authorised by Hugo Chavez and including later the assassination of Chavez himself when the very obedient one let the wild beasts know that he, Chavez, ought to be Fidel’s successor.
Beautiful Venezuela, so pregnant for so long, to give birth also to your own Revolution. Is that what you wanted? No! Now all of this is about to happen. Maybe it has already happened.
Today, those who don’t know about any of this, are angry on the streets in Venezuela. They are a legion of heroes. They are life. They are beauty. They are truth. They don’t yet have the strength to give up. They are not going to surrender. Let’s not abandon them, please. We are not going to abandon them.
Those free Venezuelans don’t want to live a life without liberty until the end of time. They are as tired as the Cubans, but they still have a last breath of hope. Best of all, this little ray of light may also wake up us apathetic Cubans.
Free little Venezuelans do not want to exist in a caricature of Castroism without Castros. In Venezuela today the future is showing itself, for fuck’s sake, and they are slaughtering that future in full view of the world. Don’t abandon them, please.
Please
What do we do?
I propose some International Peace Brigades, to put together a Freedom Fleet in a couple of days, and then sail from all the ports in America to Venezuela, loaded up with all our love, and more love (and food and clothes and medicines to cure the wounds of torture, and arms to close ranks by your side, and togetherness in our looks that we will never turn our backs), and once we are there, relaunch a country where words are not a perverse parody, where despotism is just a relic of the Corpse in Chief cooking in his dreadful nearly ninety years old delirium in a buried, inhuman Havana.
Venezuela, I love you.
Venezuela, let’s go.
Translated by GH
21 February 2014
