The distrust surrounding the Correa candidate was fueled by her ideological sympathy for the authoritarian regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, 25 April 2025 — When I was a child, the logo of a man with a sombrero and a machete belonging to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) seemed to me like a giant eye watching over us in every Cuban neighborhood. My childhood perception wasn’t entirely wrong; the mass organization, founded almost 65 years ago, was conceived as a parapolice force for social control. The mere mention of its acronym, CDR, caused people in homes across the island to lower their voices to avoid denunciations. But the terrifying shadow of this entity extends beyond our borders.
This week, the vote count concluded in Ecuador. The current president, Daniel Noboa, was reelected by more than eleven points over Correa’s candidate, Luisa González. Among the reasons for the defeat of the Citizens’ Revolution (RC) candidate, many point to the leader of this political force, Rafael Correa, who has taken refuge in Belgium. This defeat marks the third failed attempt by the former president to bring his party back to power. But it wasn’t just the rejection by Ecuadorian society of the current RT TV presenter that dug the electoral grave for his party; other factors came from outside.
The candidate raised the proposal to create groups of “peace managers” in the neighborhoods, who would have an active presence
González was unable to dispel doubts about her strategy to combat one of the biggest problems facing Ecuador right now: rampant insecurity, largely linked to drug trafficking. The candidate floated the proposal
to create groups of “peace managers” in neighborhoods, who would have an active presence and work in collaboration with law enforcement, but would not be in uniform. The description of these surveillance bodies immediately aroused suspicion and cast the shadow of the Cuban CDRs over the elections.
The distrust surrounding González’s project was also fueled by his proximity to and ideological sympathy for the authoritarian regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. In the days leading up to the elections, references to the Island’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution multiplied in debates, opinion columns, and articles published about the second round of elections in Ecuador. A young friend, living in Quito, called me a few hours before the polls opened and, although she confirmed that she wasn’t enthusiastic about Noboa, she assured me that her ballot couldn’t support anything even remotely resembling the system imposed by Fidel Castro.
In the second half of the last century, the admirers of the Cuban process who wanted to copy its steps to implement them in their respective countries were, sadly, the majority in our region.
After listening to my friend’s words, I couldn’t help but reflect on the significant changes that have occurred in Latin American leaders. In the second half of the last century, the admirers of the Cuban process who wanted to copy its steps and implement them in their respective countries were, sadly, the majority in our region. Havana seemed to lead the way on a path that millions of inhabitants of this continent longed to follow to the letter. These were times when critics of Castroism, like the recently deceased Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, were the target of acts of repudiation, media lynchings, and cancellations of their conferences in the face of the thunderous outcries of fans of the Cuban model.
However, time has passed, and the evidence can no longer be hidden, even behind the still-effective Cuban official propaganda machine. The conviction that a dictatorial system has taken hold on the island is increasingly shared. Now, the exact opposite seems to be happening. All it takes is for a presidential candidate to show any sympathy with Havana for the intentions to vote for him him to suffer.
If there are countries in Latin America that export raw materials, oil, or minerals, Cuba has become the main supplier of an anti-model, a map that clearly shows the political geography toward which we should not move.
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Editor’s Note: This text was originally published in Deutsche Welle in Spanish.