Raul inherited from his brother Fidel Castro absolute power in Cuba and with time he has managed to perfect the mass entertainment syndrome. The latest play to entertain is the new “Migratory Law.”
I recognize that from outside one looks with another perspective on what happens in Cuba; we realize that we lived in a bubble of lies, fraud and political manipulation. I also believe that the complicity of Cubans goes hand in hand with the fear and double standards. That’s why we have ended up ruined morally, economically and losing many values.
The press has played a key role in the interests of Raul Castro in this latest political machination. I note with amazement the headlines, but one causes more pain than happiness: “Cuban doctors will be able to travel.”
Where can Cuban physicians travel to?
Well, actually most of the doctors in Cuba can not visit Varadero, Cayo Coco or some other tourist resort in the country because the average salary does not reach $ 25 a month, so I imagine they can not get on a plane and visit other nations.
Let’s suppose that some family member overseas can pay the costs for these professionals and help them to overcome the obstacles of the visa. Will the Cuban regime let them travel with the documents that prove they are health professionals, their certification, their courses and their medical degree? I think not and Havana knows by heart that most doctors want to travel abroad with a one-way ticket without thinking of the return.
The frustration, uncertainty and despair of every Cuban professional is notable in more private dialogue.
In any event, this Migratory Law may be the fissure that lets many Cubans squeeze through the gap to freedom, and that pleases me. Although in all honesty I don’t believe the story: “We can all travel!”
‘The Raft’ (La balsa), installation of the artist Armando Mariño.General Raul Castro’s new migratory regulations have aroused enthusiasm in many Cubans. Like the gold rush in the nineteenth century. Or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
We agree: migratory reform will not bring democracy, political tolerance and respect for human rights. Things will remain the same in Cuba. More or less.
The Special Services will continue to be particularly hard on dissidents. Military employers will continue to expand their economic power by controlling an 80% bite of the strategic sectors that generate hard currency.
But if you visit the island and speak frankly with the Cubans, you will notice that many have burned their bridges waiting for the starting pistol, on January 14, 2013.
In a Havana neighborhood, five people feel that 2012 will be their last year to Cuba. Rosa already sold her three-bedroom home in Vibora Park for $22,000. “Thanks to the efforts of friends, with the money I can get a temporary residence in Costa Rica. I have a job offer. I hear it’s a beautiful country, not for nothing is it called the Switzerland of America,” she says, expectantly.
Antonio is another story. “I signed the document authorizing my daughter to travel to Chile for two years with her mother. We will be apart, but she has a work contract at an IT company. The agreement was that if she can establish herself, she will earn money for my ticket plane,” he says. At least Antonio didn’t demand money to authorize the travel of their minor daughter, which is common in these parts.
Even elderly people opt for a future far away. Rodolfo, 60, a German translator, has a married son in South America. But his dream is to look for a few euros in Germany. He has good contacts with German businessmen and in mid-2013 expects to spend some time “clicking” in the land of Goethe.
Norberto, meanwhile, is determined to sell his car, a 1957 Chevrolet, and with the money he can afford a six-month stay in Angola. “According to Angolan friends, job opportunities abound. I know Portuguese, I have technical skills in construction and could work in any of the projects being carried out in Luanda and Cabinda.”
Niurka has it harder. She is an engineer, and the new immigration measures look very closely at professionals. “With money and gifts I got my release from my job. I studied in Moscow and I have many Russian friends. I hope to travel with my husband, who also graduated in the USSR. We know Russian. We have been told that Russia now abounds in the new rich.”
Please do not try to spoil the party for these habaneros, talking about how hard life the life of an immigrant is, or about the bestial crisis raging through Europe. Or think they are Party functionaries or walking idiots who blindly believe what is published in the official media.
The economic crisis affecting many nations today is no invention of the newspaper Granma. But when a person has sold all his possessions, he does not want to hear bad omens.
While waiting for January 14, people are still making plans. For two convertible pesos, Internet you can download the list of countries that do not require visas to Cubans. Or you can copy from Wikipedia the customs of peoples considered exotic.
And many on the Island are now looking at countries that historically have not been the traditional destinations of the diaspora. Spain and the United States are still coveted options. But Spain is scary with its suffocating economic crisis and 40% youth unemployment.
The United States, meanwhile, is the natural destination. If you ask any potential emigrant to choose which country they want to live in, eight in ten say our northern neighbor. But few in Cuba believe that rigid U.S. immigration authorities will grant visas to Cubans, knowing that because of the Cuban Adjustment Act they would not return home.
So those with the possibility of travel have widened their horizons. And they’re thinking they will land in Serbia, Brazil, South Africa or any small island in the Caribbean.
In any event, many in Cuba excitedly await Jan. 14. The Government has announced that more than 200 offices dedicated to immigration procedures will be opened throughout the island
All four sleep in the same bed. Under the mattress there is a pair of suitcases and in the corner of the room a hanger with just a few clothes. Every day they buy pizzas or snacks because they don’t have anything to cook with, no dishes, no spoons. They’ve sold everything, or almost everything. The house, the car from the fifties, and the home appliances they once had. They even got rid of the family vault in the cemetery, the porcelain vases and a post-office box – at the neighborhood post office – which they barely used. They gave their relatives in the countryside everything no one wanted to buy, the used clothes, the faded toys and the old sewing machine. Then they rented the little room where they are now, waiting for this coming Monday when the immigration reform goes into effect.
Like so many Cubans, this couple has waited for years to be able to emigrate with their two minor children. Only when the new flexibilizations go into effect will travel finally be permitted for those under 18. It seems like a trivial detail, but I know many parents who are tied to this land because they can’t leave their children behind. People who have had to choose between living anywhere else on the planet, alone, or staying here, accompanied but frustrated. For decades the only children who managed to travel were those few privileged ones whose parents served on official missions, or – on the contrary – who left “definitively,” with no return. There was no middle ground when it came to children.
So, like eager runners at the starting line, many are waiting for the signal to head toward the airport, their children in tow. Meanwhile, they live in rented rooms and try to change their convertible pesos into a currency that will work abroad. From last October, when Decree-Law 302 was published, this fever to escape has swelled. No sooner was the notice published than digital sites started to fill with classified ads offering houses and other property for sale. Part of the capital to pay for the tickets and start a new life somewhere else is obtained through liquidating assets in the national territory. Getting rid of everything to leave, dismantling oneself to exist. A trend that started with the authorization to buy and sell houses at the end of 2011, but that now has intensified.
Despite various embassies strengthening the requirements to get a visa, we should not underestimate the ingenuity and the thousand and one tricks Cubans can boast of. Including circulating a list of nations that don’t demand a visa from those whose passports bear the shield with a solitary palm. Although, sadly, there are no direct flights to most of these destinations, and so permission is needed from the country where the plane touches down en route. But this is not enough of a reason to discourage those who want to emigrate. They have patiently waited for this moment and no obstacle is going to destroy the illusion. Counting the days, vegetating at half speed, January 14th could be the start of a new life for them. Will they reach it?
The Conversation. Sculpture donated to Havana by Vittorio Perrotta.
I turn on the TV and see a woman giving birth in front of the camera at some hospital in the interior of the country. The voice of a spokeswoman explains the birth figures for 2012, while I wonder if they asked the woman’s permission to film her during childbirth. The most probably answer is no. Ten minutes later a friend comes by and gives me an article where Alan Gross’s attorney protests because the Cuban government has released the medical history of his client. The subject reminds me of that scene where a hidden camera in a hospital captured Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s mother talking with a doctor, not knowing she was being recorded. The footage was broadcast in prime time to millions of viewers to see, clearly without her authorization, the suffering of a woman who was about to lose her son.
But the saga doesn’t end there. Last September the director of a polyclinic explained the symptoms of a dissident who fell ill while on a hunger strike. All the details were relayed without the least shame about violating the privacy of a patient and also violating the Hippocratic oath when it says, “I will remain silent about everything that, in my profession or out of it, I hear or see in the lives of men.” I myself, resolved more than three years ago never to step foot in a doctor’s office again, after the frightened doctor who treated me was forced to testify in front of an official lens. I decided – fully considering the risk – to take charge of my health and safeguard, in this way, my privacy. Still today, every time I think about a hospital visit, it’s as if I see myself on a stage with lights, cameras… and a vast public looking at my insides, my guts.
Now, the same media officials who have used intrusion into medical records as an ideological tool, defend the secrecy over Hugo Chavez’s state of health. On TV where we have seen attacks on the privacy of so many patients, they now charge that those who demand information about the Venezuelan president are being morbid. They forget that they are the ones who have accustomed their audience to snooping in hospital records, as if it were ethically acceptable. And all these little people with their privacy violated by the national press? Don’t they also deserve respect? And all these physicians and medical institutions that failed to hold to their most sacred principles? Will they be penalized now that medical indiscretion is no longer politically correct?
Site manager’s note: This article comes from the blog Red Observatorio Crítico (Critical Observer Network) and has been linked to here by OLPL. The translation of the post from that site is as follows:
By Rafael Vivero
Workers for MINFAR (Ministry of the Armed Forces) and MININT (Ministry of the Interior) and their family members were given a simple sheet with instructions about how to respond to the recently concluded Population and Housing Census, swearing confidentiality. “Civil defense” workers were ordered to lie on the Census, and say that they worked for the “People’s Power.”
Summary translation of the notice:
Possible Questions You Will Be Asked
What title or diploma do you possess?
If you are a military engineer respond that you are a civil engineer.
What did you do yesterday?
I worked.
What is your occupation?
[The form lists what they should say, based on their position — for example a “soldier” becomes an “operator” and then the form directs them to do so “ALL WITHOUT MENTIONING THE ARMY.”]
Under whose name did you work this week?
All categories should respond “Under the Provincial People’s Power”
The current economic and social crisis spreads and worsens among the most vulnerable sectors of the population: children, elderly, disabled, women, ethnic minorities. It is not an isolated case. It is a well-structured plot over 50 years ago to control an entire country. The lack of ethical and moral values and rampant corruption of the ruling class is added to the above.
Despite the illusory reforms announced by President Raul Castro on assuming leadership of the nation, the reality is quite different.
Unemployment, cuts in public budgets, the inefficiency of the political, economic and productive system, and repeated promises for more than 50 years, have led to the impoverishment and marginalization of an entire people, accosted and frightened by the constant harassment and repression.
Although 64 years have passed since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Cuban totalitarian regime attacks anyone who dissents from the official discourse, and even if the offense or insult is verbal, the State resorts to physical assault and even murder if necessary.
There were more than 440 political arrests during the month of November, which tripled what happened in 2010, is an example of increased repression unleashed by those who for over 50 years have held power in the island.
There is perennial harassment is against the Ladies in White, who were beaten on November 4th and 11th in the provinces of Holguin and Santiago de Cuba, for the crime of attending Mass and asking for freedom for the political prisoners who are still behind bars.
Calixto Ramón Martínez, an independent journalist, 42, who remains on hunger strike since 10 November in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, is held in contempt for uncovering the existing uncontrolled cholera outbreak across the country; he is is one of those who daily risk their lives so that the reality of what is happening in Cuba will not be forgotten.
The writer Ángel Santiesteban, winner of the Casa de las Americas of 2009 for his novel, is sentenced to five years in prison on a false accusation – dismissed by the trial court – announced with sarcasm and irony in advance by political police officer who calls himself Camilo.
There are 21 members of the Cuban Patriotic Union currently imprisoned without charges or justification for peacefully demanding freedom and democracy. A quarter of all its members.
Antonio Rodiles, held for nine days; Angel Santiesteban, Angel Moya, Librado Linares and nine opponents beaten and detained, from November 7th to 9th; for inquiring about the arbitrary detention of a young couple, both independent lawyers.
Physical aggression against Guillermo Farinas, 2010 winner of the European Union’s Sakharov Prize, and even the threats to Elizardo Sanchez, president of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights, in mid-month, after leaving a meeting of opponents, something that didn’t happen two years ago.
There was the savage aggression against the young woman Berenice Hector Gonzalez, in the province of Cienfuegos, for defending the honor of the women of her family who are Ladies in White. The 15-year-old suffered countless stabs the face, neck, forearms, thighs and buttocks received, while her assailant, daughter of a colonel in the Ministry of the Interior of the province, is paraded through the streets of Perla del Sur without any problems, these were actions of gross violations of human rights.
The Cuban regime degrades itself before the fear of loss of power and control of the streets, but the increase in public and street protests, the denunciations of repression and abuses committed by the political police and paramilitary mobs, the call to reflection and alternatives used by dissidents to achieve the needed freedom and democracy, show that the Cuban people have said: Enough.
The “massification” in almost all aspects and areas of Cuban life has left the common citizen completely isolated. The sites of participation have been and are increasingly operated and controlled by the omnipresent one Party and its scapegoats. Every day free spirited citizens suffer inhuman social isolation, persecution, and at the same time continue to speak more frequently of uncontrolled beatings, of incredible criminal prosecutions and even imprisonment.
The lack of spaces for pluralism and participation, is another of the causes of the lack of freedom in our country, and the margins in which a healthy climate of pluralism and respect for diversity can exist remain narrow — particularly in the socio-political sphere — where rights that allow for personal initiative, creativity and innovation independent out of state can be discussed and exercised.
The inconsistency between what they say and what they do is becoming increasingly obvious, the work of hard-line control on the part of the moderators toward the elementary exercise of freedom has not let up… With continued use of these mechanisms they will only manage to exclude citizens, who with a beautiful love for our society and country will not accept being locked into a double standard, in the framework that supports corruption and social disorder. It’s clear that after decades of looking for him the “New Man” has never appeared, we have only demonstrated results of laziness and apathy. The fear of criticism — even constructive criticism — has become widespread, like a pandemic of evil that spreads and contaminates.
The emerging practice in knowledge for the exercise of freedom is vital, existing civil society has been turned into an amorphous mass, leaving microscopic spaces for freedom… docilely ceding to the control and intimidation of a State what no longer hides its repression of the inevitable desire for freedom of an entire people. Those who are aware must educate themselves and raise awareness of rights and responsibilities, that will bring the full exercise of freedom that we so desperately need.
Achieving freedom does not happen solely through protests, but through social responsibility and collective pain… for I read someone who said, sadly their name doesn’t come to mind right now: Freedom is not given to man with blows of freedom… Freedom is without any doubt the fruit of the inner dominion, not a trade in vindications.”
I invite us all to come together, with courage, creativity, responsibility, honesty and skill.
The sale of unrationed eggs at 1.50 Cuban pesos, one of the cheapest foods most in demand by the capital’s population, has disappeared, as has the re-sale at 2.00 pesos in private homes and in the street.
Aspects denoting lack of organization and laziness significantly affected the poultry production of entities such as the National Poultry Complex of Camagüey (CANC), which belongs to the Ministry of Agriculture (MINAG).
According to a report that appeared on Sunday January 6 in the government newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), the main cause of the low production was the delay in delivery of essential food for birds, so that more than 600,000 suffered from a lack of feed.
“At the end of December, the deficit exceeded 25.2 million eggs. Hen losses exceeded 20,000 and the economic and financial loss amounted to 6.5 million pesos,” said Adelfo Diaz, director of CANC (Camagüey National Poultry Complex) in Camagüey.
If in 2011 the production was good, it’s not clear why it has fallen so much. There are currently perceived flaws in production and in the the relationship with suppliers of feed, resulting in a decline in production and financial loss.
The directors of basic industries have no power to determine what to do in any contingency, the State always controls and rarely helps, hence the negative impact seems to be cured only with the replacement of birds.
Despite efforts undertaken that have not been given permission to own their own feed mills, in Camagüey, for example, that have to go to provinces far away as Villa Clara and Cienfuegos for feed, which raises the usual problems of transportation, the most absurd of which is the ban on transport records leaving the province where the CANC is located.
The government “sticks its nose into everything” is unable to provide these companies new technology, spare parts and bank accounts in order to undertake their operations so they do not have financial autonomy and must carry out their financial transactions in Cienfuegos, the reason we are seeing economic-productive losses.
These problems have a negative impact on the workers because reductions in productivity reduce their wages, due to a piece-rate system. As is common in the imperfect Cuban economic model, the workers and the people in general who can only opt for the standard quota of 10 eggs per month, are suffering the breakdown of the productive process full of subjectivities that never affect the ruling class.
Those Cubans on the other side of 50 saw those days when we were kids disappear by the will of the Castrocracy; those awaited days of Christmas, when the whole family joyfully gathered around a properly set, well-loaded table, in a celebration more traditional than religious. Believers or atheists the end-of-year holidays were a reason to get together and share, to renew affections, to strengthen family ties.
The holidays ended at the beginning of January with the day most anticipated by the children, the Day of the Three Kings — Epiphany — when we woke ourselves early in the morning to find they toys brought by the kind Melchor, Gaspar and Balthazar. It was, as I remember, a ritual in which we went with our parents to look in the shop windows filled with bright and colorful toys during the days before, the never-failing letter to the Kings attached with great hope on the night of January 5th to the newest shoes we owned, and perhaps some gifts from us to the camels and their riders. For example, my older brother and I always put out grass for the camels to eat and a box of cigarettes for the Kings because we assumed that if our father smoked, surely the Kings did too.
If I’m not mistaken, it was the second half the decade of the ’60s when Christmas and the Day of the Three Kings were banned in Cuba. They were, according to the authorities, religious celebrations that had nothing to do with the Revolutionary and Marxist spirit of our process. Many parents maintained with great effort for a time the tradition of the Three Magi — mine among them, although they were atheists — and the government was clever enough not to eliminate the children’s party at one stroke: with the perversity that characterized they established a “standard” that would govern, for a long time, the distribution of toys so that all of us children were “equal” and so to overcome the unfair bourgeoisie differences where, they asserted, the rich kids had toys and the poor kids didn’t.
From that time every child had the right to three toys a year, one “basic” (costing more than five pesos at that time), and two “additional,” cheaper ones. Shortly after they would establish another variant and there would no longer be two additional, but rather one additional and another “directed.” This last would be a toy with very little monetary value — although in the end the truth is that the real value of a toy is what it gives each child — something like a trumpet, a packet of soldiers, a game of jacks, or a jump rope. A detail of the system, expert in limits and parceling out: toys were for children up to twelve years old. At thirteen you officially were no longer a child.
The so-called “Revolutionary Offensive” of 1968, which liquidated at one blow the last pockets of private property that survived in Cuba, also eliminated the possibility of purchasing some handmade toys sold in small little trinket shots and other family businesses. Havana, in particular, had countless of these little shops. My generation still remembers the variety of toys, for very reasonable prices, were bought in those modest establishments and with which many parents of the poorest families celebrated January 6 in their homes. Not to mention that the shops selling industrially produced toys offered something for all budgets.
At the beginning of the ’70s the official imagination introduced an even more perverse method: the draw. This consisted of a lottery based on the ration card numbers of each nuclear family that had a child between zero and twelve. Every number pulled out of the drum established the day and numerical order in which each person could buy, within the five days established for the sale of toys. Those who were able to buy on the first day got the best toys, and the unhappy who bought on the fifth day only got the leftovers.
It’s clear that by this stage the Three Kings had disappeared from the process; the toys arrived according to the luck of the drawn and we knew that it was our parents who bought them in the stores assigned to them. Another delicious detail of the system: they implemented a “Children’s Day,” celebrated in July, as a replacement for the traditional Three Kings Day on January 6.
But behold, the traditions and dreams can outlast any dictatorship and remain planted in the deepest cultural memories of a people. For several years now, without any official measure of approval, Cuban families have restored that peculiar monarchy of the Three Kings and it is now a rare home where the children don’t celebrate January 6. Melchor, Gaspar and Baltasar have returned, although with them they have also recycled the perversity of the system.
Now the shops of the Castrocracy offer toys, always in hard currency, for those parents who can buy them at the exorbitant prices on display Of course, there are no longer “basics,” “additionals” or “directeds”; there are no lotteries nor assigned coupons. It seems the government has already forgotten its aspirations for egalitarianism, but the facilities that existed long ago, when there were toys for every budget, have not been restored.
As for me, I welcome the return of the Three Kings, who ultimately never left the popular imagination. It’s too bad that now the Cuban dictatorship, in its never-ending cynicism, is using them for personal gain.
Havana, Cuba–The altar of the Virgin of Begoña is located in the ancient Church of San Francisco at the Corner of Amargura and Cuba streets in the old part of Havana.
The statue’s arrival in Havana along with the building of the altar was the initiative of the Vasco Navarra Association Charities Ladies Committee. Among the noble benefactors were Mesdames Manolita Uriarte, Pilar Alonso, Carmen Landa, Pilar Azcueta, and Miss Chatin Isasi. The construction was overseen by the President of the Association, the illustrious Mr. D Venancio Zabaleta Aramburu.
The statue of the Virgin is a unique beauty with a jeweled dress and inlaid in relief. The altar is made of marble and the wall surrounding the niche is decorated by paintings that recall the homeland which follows this devotion or worship.
The church that jealously guards the worship of the Virgin of Begoña is under the care of the Conventual Franciscan Fathers of Cuba, one of the few religious orders that have moved to the island with the approval of the Cuban government in recent years.
As every year, every time we approach the festivities of Christmas Eve, Christmas and New Years, the Cuban military are far from home and family, locked in their barracks or running from one place to another after a fictitious enemy or ghost landing. Nothing new. From the first of January 1959 there has always been a justification for this to happen. This year, 2012, will be no exception, as the characteristics that the history of Congo, Ethiopia, Angola and other countries where Cuban troops were involved in wars or guerrilla fronts is being repeated in Venezuela this year end.
Many of major world media announced today that a tracheotomy had to be performed in Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to keep him on life support after suffering a respiratory infection after his fourth operation for pelvic cancer.
The situation seems quite serious, when the chosen successor to Chavez, Vice President Nicolas Maduro has called, from Havana, several Venezuelan leaders who support Chavez, Diosdado Cabellos, president of the National Assembly, perhaps with the intention of their serving as witnesses to the possible death or impossible inauguration of Chavez as president for another term of office this coming January.
Given the uncertainty that they could escape from government control in the event of either of the two variants, the members of the Cuban intelligence and the Cuban military in Venezuela are on high alert. To this must be added the thousands of doctors, health personnel, teachers, coaches, close to 50,000 people, who by necessarily are subject to the orders of Cuban Brigadier General Andollo, top leader of all of the island’s personnel now in Venezuela.
The possibility of a coup in favor of Maduro, the “godson” of Fidel Castro, which would enable the Island’s regime to maintain the ample supplies of money and oil, floats in the atmosphere.
We have to wait to see what happens, but for now, on December 15, Fidel Castro already said goodbye in person to his disciple, a leave-taking embodied in a note to Chavez supporters published by the press: “I have complete confidence in you as in him, and however painful his absence might be, you are capable of continuing his work.” This was addressed to the Cuban military in Venezuela.
Hugo Chávez and the Castro brothers knew in the summer of 2011 that the Venezuelan’s chances of survival were almost nil and began to prepare for a post-Chávez era.
They would try to cure the loquacious lieutenant colonel, of course, but ever since the doctors realized the type of cancer he had (an aggressive and rare rhabdomyosarcoma), the gravity and extent of the metastasis and the delay in taking him to the operating room, nobody had any illusions.
But for a miracle, Chávez was sentenced to an early death. That is why the Castros concealed the medical information and handled the crisis in total secrecy. It was not a whim. It was a desperate and uncomfortable way to maintain political control. It was vital to keep up the pretense that Chávez would recover, so that no ambitions would flourish inside the restless tribe of presumptive heirs.
To the Cuban brothers, it was essential to sedate all the Venezuelans, especially the Chavistas, for the purpose of controlling and manipulating the transfer of authority in Caracas, so that Cuba might not lose the enormous Venezuelan subsidy, estimated at $10 billion a year by the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban Studies.
The argument to be used would not be that, of course, but “the need to save the Bolivarian revolution.”
In August 2012, the Castros and the doctors assigned to treat such a delicate patient agreed that the outcome could come soon and that there was no guarantee that Chávez would arrive in a reasonable physical and mental condition at the December election (which is exactly what happened), so they moved the election up to Oct. 7. Those two months were crucial.
At that time, the Castros clearly thought that Chávez’s best replacement, from the perspective of Cuban interests, was Nicolás Maduro. Here was a reasonably intelligent man, at least voluble and endowed with a good memory, who was able to spout flamboyant historical sophistry of the type Fidel and Hugo like so much.
He was docile, obedient and accepted Castroism’s moral and ideological supremacy the way Chávez did. He seemed to be an attentive and disciplined disciple.
Besides, as often happens in the world of politics, one of his comparative advantages — in terms of the Castros — was his helplessness. Nicolás Maduro was not part of the 1992 coup attempt. He had no roots in the army. He did not control the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and wasn’t even a member of the National Assembly. In fact, his only tie to power was the backing of a dying Chávez and the support of the Cubans.
The Castros — who have an instinct for maneuvering and an astounding ability to fleece their allies — thought that, just as Hugo Chávez found in Cuba an essential source of strategic advice, international initiatives and information about friends and foes, Nicolás Maduro, given his weakness inside Venezuela’s power groups, would follow the same pattern of emotional and political dependency.
Of course, inside Venezuelan society, even inside the Chávez movement, there are many people (some of them in positions of command) who don’t approve of Cuba’s arrogant interference in the affairs of their country.
To them, it is inconceivable that a poor and backward island in the Caribbean, six times smaller than their country, with less than half the population of Venezuela, abysmally managed by a family/military dynasty for 54 years, struggling to change its economic model because it knows it’s disastrous, and in need of copious subsidy lest it collapse, should govern the Venezuelans and choose Hugo Chávez’s heir. Never before had they seen such an absurdity.
Soon the Castros will find out how difficult it is to control the destiny of another nation, unless they occupy it by military force, something that’s absolutely unthinkable. Then they will understand the profound meaning of the disconsolate phrase spoken by Bolívar: “I have plowed the sea.” What’s likely is that, after Chávez’s burial and despite all efforts to control the successor, the same will happen to the Venezuelan subsidy. It will soon become a memory.
