Category: Carlos Alberto Montaner

The two eastern regions of Ukraine (Donetsk and Lugansk) were populated – I was going to write “plagued” – by ethnic Russians who communicate in Russian. Since Russian and Ukrainian have a common origin and share the same alphabet, some people think that it is the same language, but it is not true. According to many philologists, Ukrainian language is closer to Polish or Czech than to Russian. In addition, ensuring that Donetsk and Lugansk separate from Ukraine is an unspeakable forgetfulness of the values ​​of the republic, safeguarded by the Minsk Agreements, signed in 2014 and 2015 in the capital of Belarus, the same government that today betrays them.

What is Russia seeking by crushing its neighbor Ukraine with its overwhelming military power? If Putin thinks that by reestablishing the ‘zones of influence’ Russia will be more protected against a nuclear rocket, he has failed to find out (as a CNN analyst said) the current correlation of forces. The fate of Moscow or Saint Petersburg, and of any densely populated Russian city, lies in an unknown silo in Nebraska or Montana and in a GPS with the encrypted address of the site to which it will take its nuclear warhead, fifty times more destructive than the bomb that reduced Hiroshima to ashes in 1945.

Influence is measured nowadays by the quality and price of the objects around us, and none of them are Russian. Indeed, Russia has a third world economy. It has the approximate size of the Italian economy, but with 2.45 times more inhabitants. It is a single producer and exporter of energy, like Saudi Arabia, but without the investment expertise of Arab businesspeople. When gas and oil run out or are replaced by other technology (German scientists are experimenting with neutrinos), Russia – Vladimir Nabokov said in another context – “was a dream I had,” as the filmmaker Jiménez-Leal frequently quotes.

The sanctions will have a devastating effect on Russia’s third world economy. Depriving it of its sources of financing or the markets that buy Russian gas or oil will have a decisive impact in the medium or long term. Especially if an alternative for the supply of gas and oil is achieved and a real agreement is established between the US, the European Union, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Australia. This agreement, in turn, must impose very serious sanctions against those who violate the agreement.

Are we close to World War III, as happened in 1962 during the “Missile Crisis”? No, but the reasons for preventing it are the same: Russia would be thoroughly destroyed. It is true that the United States would also be knocked down, but wars are fought to win them, not to lose them or to be half demolished. In the US, where everything is calculated, it is assumed that cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants would be destroyed. Of course, there is an increased risk that a definitive conflict occurs by chance and not by the intention of the involved parties. In the 1960s and 1970s there were at least two occasions when nuclear escalation was very possible. In both cases we were saved by the good sense of a Soviet intermediate-rank operator, who listened to his intuition and did not follow “the rules of engagement.” There is no guarantee that this will happen in the future.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

I was living in Miami then, I was 19 years old, and I took several dozen young Cubans to the US Army with the promise that we would land in Cuba. “Tony” Varona, returning from Washington where he met with JFK advisors, assured me of this and I repeated his words to the boys. Varona was one of the leaders of the resistance, former Prime Minister of democratic Cuba, and a fundamentally honest person. He had a son imprisoned in Cuba after the landing at the Bay of Pigs

Fortunately, that did not happen. We all would have died. The Soviet colonels – there were 40,000 Russian soldiers in Cuba – had tactical nuclear weapons that they could use at will. That was found out many years later. They would have launched them against us, which would have generated an atomic war between the USSR and the United States in a short time.

There was even an episode in which the direct confrontation between a landing of the United States army and the Soviet troops stationed in Cuba was not necessary to ignite the spark. Many years after the incident, it was learned that a Soviet submarine broke through the US Navy’s blockade during the “October Crisis.” It was equipped with a nuclear charge that would have shattered an aircraft carrier and its attack flotilla, a fact unknown to the Americans.

The Americans launched depth charges to bring it to the surface. The submarine had lost contact with its base and its crew didn’t know if the war had already begun. According to the rules for launching an attack, all three commanding officers had to agree: the captain, the first mate, and the second mate. The captain and the first officer thought that the fighting had already begun, but the second mate, named Vasili Arkhipov, didn’t believe in that possibility and persuaded his two companions not to fight back. He was a hero of whom nothing was known until many years later.

In 1962 Marxism-Leninism was actually a vaguely credible option. Nikita claimed that in 10, 20 or 30 years the USSR would be on a par with the US. The Soviets had inaugurated the space age with the Sputnik and “the power of the Soviets plus electricity,” as Lenin wanted, was paying off, especially after the devastation of World War II. There were urban areas that grew at 10% per year.

But it was a matter of ignorance. One had only to read the book entitled Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, written by Ludwig von Mises in 1922 (probably written for Lenin, then in his heyday), about the failure of the price system under socialism, and how it would end up producing a monstrous distortion that would make economic calculation totally impossible. However, in 1962 it was not necessary to resort to reading or theoretical analysis. It was enough to compare the results of the two Germanys to know what would happen in one and the other system after a few years.

In short, Mr. Díaz-Canel, Putin is playing with fire and he’s going to burn himself. The British have sold the Ukrainians hundreds and hundreds of state-of-the-art weapons that are fired from the shoulder at tanks and artillery pieces. Estonia is used to deliver Israel’s Spikes missiles against aviation to Kiev. To direct the presumed war, the US has installed its headquarters in Albania, the most anti-Soviet of the former satellites of the USSR. France, England and the US guarantee that Russia will not use nuclear warheads. NATO under Biden is working reasonably well. What are you going to get into that war for, President? It is a grave for Russia. Do you them to bury you in it?

The size of the Russian economy is roughly that of Italy, but Italians are less than half the population of Russia. Putin is making the same mistake as his predecessors. They see that they have the largest nation on earth (approximately twice the size of the US or China) and from this they deduce that they can develop an empire. In 1991 it was seen to be “Bangladesh with missiles,” as US diplomat Jeanne Kirkpatrick used to say. Only 32% of Russians want to revitalize the empire; 68% presumably want to live better. Like the Cubans, señor Díaz-Canel. Cubans want to pursue their own dreams and not those of the leaders. When will you learn your lesson,  president?

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

She was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison plus five years of close surveillance, although theoretically she will spend them in her home. Her two siblings – Tito and Lucy, male and female – work loyally for the FBI. Montes will soon be released from prison, but she would have left her perfidious work very well done.

Indeed. Ana Belén Montes became the main analyst on Cuban issues for that institution for a great number of years. Her job consisted of coordinating from the Pentagon the vision between the different intelligence sections on the Cuban revolution, but her secret mission, agreed to with Havana, was to minimize the risk to Cuban communism and convince Washington of the convenience of lifting the embargo against the Island.

Fidel Castro didn’t like the arrival of Gorbachev at the Kremlin (1985). He came to think that Gorbachev was a CIA agent. “He can’t be such an idiot,” he said back then. He prepared for the worst. He met with the Brazilian trade unionist Lula da Silva. Brazil was a giant country, and the leader of the metallurgists union could support him with the “Workers Party.” Fidel Castro convinced him to support the Sao Paulo Forum. It was a kind of ‘International’ of the Latin American left that included the most violent organizations, such as the FARC and 47 other groups, which met in Sao Paulo in July 1990.

Faced with Mikhail Gorbachev’s strategy of “liberating Russia from the weight of the Soviet Union,” Fidel, who never did the math, didn’t care that the USSR was ruined on the way. His goal was fighting and defeating the United States, his particular war since he confessed to his secretary and lover Celia Sánchez his leitmotif in a handwritten letter dated June 5, 1958, in the middle of the Sierra Maestra.

Gorbachev’s strategic vision was evident in two matters that were very important to Fidel: he was notified, very discreetly, that Moscow would not continue to pay for the presence of Cubans in Africa, and the USSR sent a message to the Sandinista Front that it would not continue financing the war against the “Contra.” Gorbachev urged them to go to free elections against Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, something that Fidel strongly discouraged.

It seemed that communism was collapsing, but the Cuban regime showed that perseverance pays great results, even when its objectives were not the same ones that the USSR advocated – ending private property.

In 1990-1991 it seemed that Latin America had returned to the fold of democracy and development. Chile had separated from Augusto Pinochet, but not from its commitment to the market. But it didn’t happen like that: in 1994 Fidel invited Hugo Chávez, an unknown Venezuelan coup leader who had just been released from prison and had less than 2% popular support. At the end of 1998 he was elected President, guided by the Cuban political operators, and the return of chaos began.

In 2006 Evo Morales was elected in Bolivia. In 2007, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. In 2019 many young Chileans rebelled against the market, destroying many symbols of their recent successes. At the end of 2021, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya was elected in Honduras. She will control the government; her husband, Daniel Ortega will take power.

As I said, it’s like “the never-ending story.” A circular nightmare. There is no remedy.
____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

The fact that the “Song of the Year” award has been given to Patria y Vida should have told the revolutionary leadership that its message smells like mothballs. It’s very old. Twenty or 30 years ago they would have awarded a song based on the motto Patria o Muerte [Homeland or Death], and it would have been awarded by a kid wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, but today it is unthinkable that something like this would happen.

On January 1^st the 63^rd year of that revolution and that regime will begin! Of course, they can remain at the helm, but how long? General Francisco Franco died in bed like Fidel, as will likely happen to Raúl, but what they will not prevent is that the young generations completely modify the political course of the country. It has always been that way in world’s history.

Franco had carefully supervised the education of his successor in the executive power – the king – to ensure there would be no surprises. Even in Parliament – which at that time was called “the Cortes” and was made up of tercios, as the fascist manuals indicated – there were some fierce parliamentarians who made up “the 40 of Ayete.” They were known like that after the small palace in which they used to meet, very close to San Sebastián, in the Basque country, Franco’s residence in some summers. It was the group of Franco supporters that, supposedly, would resist any attempt to change. Only that at the head of “the 40 of Ayete” was no other than Adolfo Suárez, the man who, together with the king, led the transition once Franco died.

Neither King Juan Carlos nor Adolfo Suárez betrayed Franco. Or, if they did, they had to choose one of two conflicting loyalties: the one they owed to the old Caudillo who had personally elevated them, or the one they owed to the new generations who had not actively participated in the civil war, just like themselves. Both Juan Carlos de Borbón and Adolfo Suárez were products of World War II, or, in any case, of the Cold War that was then being fought. They chose to lead their compatriots to modernity and extract them from the first part of the 20th century to which the Generalissimo of Spain had dragged them.

I don’t know how the example of Spain can be ignored, despite the fact that, from an economic point of view, the last 15 years of the Franco regime were splendid. Cuba has a golden opportunity to correct the wrong course taken in 1959. All it has to do is rectify, consult society, and go, as Oswaldo Payá pointed out, “from the law to the law.” Otherwise, the country may fall into another stage of unnecessary violence.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

the 20th century. Here is where the most important technological and scientific discoveries on the world emerge, but also the most transcendent literary experiences, the singer-songwriters, from ragtime to rap, along with blues, rock, country, gospel and even “niuyorquina” salsa, that combines Cuban guarachas, Puerto Rican music, and Dominican bachatas and merengues.

There is no possibility of communicating to young people the “anti-Yankee” emotions of some generations that made the revolution. For them the blockade is a pretext to oppress them. They know that Paquito D’Rivera, Chucho Valdés and Arturo Sandoval had to take their music business elsewhere, as Celia Cruz, Olga Guillot and Fernando Albuerne had done before, just to mention a few artists among the thousands who have gone into exile, because in Cuba the foolishness and the dictatorship met in an extraordinary expression that Paquito D’Rivera once had to hear, “The saxophone is a counterrevolutionary instrument.”

In fact, it is Cubans who want to change the regime that rules the island. It is not the United States. The United States cares little for the fate of its neighbors. Cubans don’t want to take to the hills or get involved in gunfights to change the regime. They wish to do so peacefully, through regular open consultations in good faith. I don’t know the opinion of the Cuban rulers. But if I were in their shoes, I would think very carefully about it.
____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Huber Matos, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Manuel Artime, Jorge Valls, Pedro Luis Boitel, Higinio “Nino” Díaz, Payá Sardiñas, Alfredo Carrión, José Ignacio Rasco and many others died. There were thousands and they were part of the process. Opposite part, but ultimately an integral part of that process. Some died and others were killed. Cuba has the golden opportunity to find a rational solution to the current crisis. Is testicular reason going to prevail again? Will thousands of Cubans have to die when it would be possible to turn the page freely consulting the whole of Cuban society?

I continue.

“It has to do with something absolutely different – the Vatican.” Cuba has penetrated (no pun intended) Pope Francis. There are cardinals who report to Havana. The pope didn’t learn that a peaceful Cuban who prayed on his knees in the square would be expelled from the Vatican. It was an intrigue of the Cuban services in collusion with Vatican Security. The pope is surrounded. At stake is a continuation of the triangle that brought Obama to Havana – the Catholic Church, represented by Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, Washington and Raúl Castro. The Cuban Church is no longer part of the equation. When Ortega Alamino died, and another Cuban cardinal was appointed, any vestige of “Raulism” disappeared in the ranks of the Cuban clergy.

The Havana regime has a huge interest in continuing the exchange and in having President Biden lift the sanctions imposed by Donald Trump. They invited Cardinal Patrick O’Malley to Cuba, despite his friendship with Xavier Suárez, former mayor of Miami and father of Francis Suárez, the current mayor of the city.

However, to hide the ultimate reason for the trip, they first took him to Dominican Republic, as if it were a regular route. O’Malley, who is no fool, knows the Cuban Security game, and knows that Obama was wrong to give so many concessions without receiving anything in return. He wouldn’t recommend anything like that to Joe Biden.

The Cuban regime is so interested in the US sanctions against the island being lifted, that it is willing to campaign to have Felix Varela declared a saint. Varela was a 19^th century Cuban priest, exiled, wise and pro-independence, who was a parish priest in New York during the height of the exodus of the Catholic Irish as a result of poor potato harvests.

Raúl Castro doesn’t have the same aversion to the Catholic Church as his brother Fidel had. When his daughter Mariela asked priest Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to bless her marriage to an Italian, Raúl Castro agreed… as long as it was something public and well-known. He didn’t want it to be a secret ceremony.

Clearly, the trigger is the November 15 protest. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have complained in CubaDebate, an electronic ‘rag’ that collects the “legacy” of the Castros.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

, despite the fact that both had got out of the car on their own feet, unaided. This was told to me by Ángel Carromero, a young Spanish man who was driving the car on the day of the crime.

Previously, the Constitution, the communist aims of Cuban society and the role of the Party had been “armored,” so that it was highly unlikely to modify the course of Cuban events. However, it is practically impossible to prevent such changes towards openness. When will they happen? Once there is a critical mass that demands them or, otherwise, when certain people with effective power have the political will to carry them out.

Both forces converge in Cuba. On July 11, it became clear that young people want to expand society’s participation margins, but, at the same time, there are thousands of cadres from the Communist Party itself who call themselves “reformists” and are eager to initiate a substantial change that allows them to abandon collectivist and authoritarian superstitions forever. It has been 62 years of continuous failures.

In this sense, the cases of Leo Brouwer, Pablo Milanés, and Silvio Rodríguez, despite being different, are very significant. They repeated the “we have come this far” of José Saramago, when three young black men were executed in Havana on April 11, 2003. Brouwer sharply distanced himself from the Cuban regime due to the repression exercised against civil society on July 11 of this year. Hundreds of peaceful people were beaten and imprisoned, which was intolerable to this great-nephew of Ernesto Lecuona, a great guitarist and a great composer.

Pablo Milanés has lived in Spain since 1992, so his clear break with the regime, expressed in previous circumstances and now reiterated, is not surprising. More significant was the position taken by Silvio Rodríguez. He talked for more than an hour with the young playwright Yunior García Aguilera, an animator from Archipiélago, and with his wife, Dayana, a filmmaker, after García Aguilera’s arbitrary arrest. From that meeting came out a formal request from the singer-songwriter to the dictatorship to release the hundreds of detainees who had not used violence.

Silvio Rodríguez said on Facebook, “The meeting with Yunior and Dayana was good, I am not exaggerating if I say fraternal; there was dialogue, exchange, we listened to each other with attention and respect. The most painful thing for me was hearing that they, as a generation, no longer felt part of the Cuban process but something else. They explained their arguments, their frustrations to me. I tried to make them understand that at my age everything was also much slower than we expected it to be.”

Silvio Rodríguez has taught Miguel Díaz-Canel a lesson on how to deal with the opposition. But he has received another quite obvious lesson – he has heard that Yunior and Dayana “do not feel part of the Cuban process.” The story of the Sierra Maestra is so old that it’s not possible for young people to bond emotionally with those stories. Silvio was born in the 1940s. Yunior in the eighties. If Silvio were as rational as he appears he would tell Díaz-Canel to get ready for the end of the party. It’s just around the corner.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

can do it.

But the second demand, according to María Werlau, the soul of “Archivo Cuba,” was that he implement the Global Magnitsky Act, and it seems that they have listened to her or have concurred. (I don’t know if the people who oppose globalization know that they are playing a game of cards shamelessly marked by Vladimir Putin.)

Many years ago, I received a message from Gustavo Arcos about General Álvaro López Miera. There were the names of other generals in the letter that I won’t reveal. Gustavo was a hero in the fight against Batista and later opposed his former friend Fidel Castro and ended up in jail.

Gustavo asked me to closely follow the figure of López Miera. I did so. He is from Santiago, although born in Havana, the son of Spanish Republicans, who had been semi-adopted by Vilma Espín and Raúl Castro. His father was a professor at the Universidad de Oriente. Supposedly, Alvaro was 14 years old (he was born in December 1943) when he rose up in arms, and then he pursued a military career in the USSR. “Vilma loved him like a son,” those who knew the ties between the two families told me.

I don’t know why Gustavo mentioned this name, but I find him once again accused as a repressor of the human rights of Cubans. For now, I remember Venezuelan General Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera, former head of SEBIN. He went over to the enemy and the sanctions were lifted. There are two epigraphs that justify that wonderful Jordan. One is “genuine repentance” and the other, because, at the request of the President of the United States, it is convenient for National Security. I don’t know which of the two criteria were applied to the Venezuelan general. Perhaps both. Anyway, there is no doubt that the sanctions exist to be eventually lifted.

There won’t be an American invasion against Cuba, despite the wishes of the Cubans inside and outside the island, unless the resistance inside Cuba provokes a generalized massacre, abundantly filmed. Faced with these facts, for humanitarian reasons, American society can be dragged into combat, but it’s very difficult for it to happen. Not even Donald Trump ordered an intervention against Nicolás Maduro, despite having flirted with “all options are on the table.” Trump was playing to scare Maduro, but he didn’t talk seriously with his generals about the possibility of destroying the Venezuelan armed forces from the air, something that would have been very easy.

This outcome is only possible if the US takes seriously what is happening in Latin America and creates an organization like NATO in its hemisphere, but I don’t see the slightest intention of implementing political decisions with full force. Nor is there, in this part of the world, a will to defend democracy like the one observed in Europe, where the United States is forced to bomb the Serbs or Libyans from the air. We are used to living with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia and soon we will get used to Mr. Pedro Castillo in Peru.

That doesn’t mean that the Cuban regime is getting away with it. Despite what AMLO in Mexico or Mrs. Cristina in Argentina shout, the protests on July 11 and 12 have served to deny the dictatorship any significant support. The obscene images of young policemen and communist militants dressed in civilian clothes, arriving in buses and equipped with bats and sticks to silence the opposition, are unforgettable. That happened throughout the island.

Although the protests were drowned in blood, the few investments that will flow will be, for the most part, unholy money. No serious and law-abiding person will want to mix with that small world of criminals.

We are very close to the end. How will it come? In the same way that the revolt of mid-July began. Unexpectedly. But it will come.

Note: This translation is from Montaner’s own blog.
____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

tennis shoes or your cell phone. Transportation belongs to the fourth world. The Internet comes and goes at the discretion of the bosses. And yet nothing happened.

What happened on July 11? It happened that Fidel died in late 2016 and Raúl, apparently, had retired. It happened that food almost ran out. Society was fed up with the official manipulations of the currency because it was one scam after another. Nothing irritates workers more than to be paid in a currency without purchasing power while products are sold in a currency that is worth 20 or 30 times more than a worker’s meager salary. The heat of the terrible Cuban summer and the absence of electric fans, much less air conditioners, happened.

The Covid-19 pandemic happened. You, Mr. President, managed that crisis very badly. The “Abdala” vaccines don’t even have the approval of the Cuban or Venezuelan health authorities. They have only reached a tiny percentage of the island’s inhabitants, while 12 million vaccines have ended up in Venezuela. They have dared to say that the effectiveness of the vaccine is 92%, after three doses. Why 92%? To be no less than the Russian vaccine? You don’t gamble with people’s lives, Mr. President. Secrecy is not a virtue in these matters. We know, because José Martí said it, that a Republic is not ruled as if it were a military camp.

All of you lack credibility, Mr. President. Nobody believes you, neither inside nor outside the country. You can’t lie to people for that long. Fidel swore that he was not a communist at the beginning of the Revolution. Then he contradicted himself and claimed that he became a Marxist-Leninist at the university. He accused the United States of all the evils that affected Cuba, including the hurricanes. He called the “embargo” a “blockade”. The embargo was a series of measures that limited commercial transactions between the two countries, as a result of the confiscations of American companies without paying a penny of compensation.

These confiscations began during the Eisenhower administration and escalated in the thousand days of the Kennedy administration. But when Obama reestablished relations in 2014 and tried to pave the way between the two nations, he was accused of being an imperialist and of having hidden intentions to annex the Island, a trend that, supposedly, had been present in the United States since the beginning of the 19th century, since the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.

Mr. President, if you don’t want to provoke a military coup, you have to open up a dialogue with society. Thousands of people have already left. The most conspicuous are the artists we all know: Chucho Valdés, los Van-Van, Leo Brouwer (Ernesto Lecuona’s great-nephew) and Silvio Rodríguez (he’s thinking about it). But there is a general, a Vice Minister in the Ministry of the Interior, named Jesús Manuel Burón Tabit, who is very upset with the abuses in Cuba, according to Juan Juan Almeida and published in Madrid’s ABC. Although if he weren’t the person, someone else would replace him.

At ninety years old, Raúl is very old and has lived to please Fidel. He is hopeless. Even after the Commander is buried, he gravitates over all of you. What did you say in the meetings? You wondered what Fidel Castro would have done. But Fidel didn’t understand anything about today’s world, and he died devoted to the production of Moringa. He could win, but not convince. Democracy serves, among other things, President, to avoid violence. It is true that you may lose power, but what good is the government if you are universally repudiated? The Cuban Revolution was exemplary in its beginnings, but the process was gradually rejected. The last vestiges of freshness were lost on July 11. Since then, they have remained as murderers and thugs. No one likes that role, Mr. President. Desertions will continue.

Note: This translation is from Montaner’s own blog.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Iván Duque will have to decide what to do with the Havana regime. He already knows that Cuban ambassador José Luis Ponce Caraballo is a smiling and skilled intelligence officer trained to penetrate and win friends, as former Cuban intelligence officer Enrique García, exiled in Miami, told me. And besides, he knows that Colombia is a desired target because of its oil production (although it has diminished substantially), and its ability to produce food for the hungry Cuban people.

If he breaks relations with Cuba, “the Cubans” assure sotto voce, they will release their internal pack of dogs, including the ELN, created by them half a century ago. But if he doesn’t, Cuban political operators will find a way for Petro to win the election. “Chávez had less than 5% when we started to operate in 1998. At the end we defeated Henrique Salas Römer by a wide margin,” they say with pride.

If Cuba conquered Venezuela when Fidel was alive and there was some hope that it would improve the quality of life of the Cuban people, today there is almost no one on the island who thinks the same regarding Colombia. All have watched with fear the gradual destruction of the country. The plummeting drop in oil production. Caracas’s inability to produce food or to meet its financial obligations. The blackouts. The sudden exile of almost six million Venezuelans. In short, they have seen in Venezuela what happens when the Cuban model is copied.

What’s the purpose of subjecting the people of Colombia to Venezuelan or Cuban horror? Why should they take the same path if Cubans are rehearsing or studying how to eliminate the Soviet model copied from the USSR in the sixties, when the USSR existed, and when Fidel, Raúl, Che Guevara and a dozen “revolutionaries” more believed the tale of Marxism and imposed an implacable dictatorship? What will they do after destroying Colombia? Will they try the same in Brazil?

Joe Biden administration’s officials in charge of Latin American affairs should ask themselves these questions. Over many years, since Clinton and his successor George W. Bush administrations, they have invested billions of dollars in strengthening Colombia, an effective and sincere ally in the fight against drug trafficking and for the preservation of democracy. Will they allow all that effort to fade away? Will they allow the sacrifices and the deaths to be without a purpose?

One of the symptoms of Third-Worldism is to completely ignore the predecessor’s acts of government. Not everything Trump did was wrong. One of his last decrees was to include Cuba once again among the nations that sponsor terrorism. Presumably, President Obama hastened to eliminate the description of the Cuban state as “terrorist,” thinking that the good intentions of one of the two contenders were enough for the other to change its behavior. He hadn’t realized that fighting bulls are programmed to charge. It’s their nature.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

A few are “filthy” rich. They are billionaires. For others it is enough to have a few millions. There are many professionals who are very well off. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, architects. Almost all have money invested in the stock market, second homes, and works of art. Small businessmen join that group. Some will grow to be great. Others will disappear, but along the way they will have learned a useful lesson that they will use in another endeavor.

The remaining 80% are part of the three middle social groups, plus the poor who struggle to join them––the upper middle group, the middle-middle group, the middle-low group and the extremely poor. Fortunately, social mobility is tremendous in the United States. I am not talking about “classes” because it is a closed concept, which Marxists have appropriated (and we can see the results.)

The extremely poor in the USA are those who have up to $25,000 a year for a family of four. Generally, they are poor people with a car, television, air conditioning, heating, drinking water, electricity, telephones, food stamps, police protection, judicial system, schools, and hospitals for free. They live in government “projects” or small subsidized apartments that, in South Florida at least, are called “Plan 8.”

The 20% and the 80%. That is the “Pareto Principle.” It is not a mandatory law of nature. It is a “principle,” an “observation” that is almost always fulfilled. Vilfredo Pareto was a great mathematician of Italian origin who taught at a Swiss university between the 19th and 20th centuries. He set out to find out the historical disparity between those who have resources and those who lack them. Wherever there is freedom to create wealth there are inventors, entrepreneurs, people who stand out for their desire to succeed.

General Raúl Castro should not find it difficult to understand the phenomenon. His father, Ángel Castro Argiz, who arrived from a Galician village wearing espadrilles, when he died in October 1956, left a capital of eight million dollars (the equivalent today of more than 100 million), several hundred workers, a 30-square kilometers farm, equipped with a movie theater, managed by his daughter Juanita, a school and a post office. Without a doubt, Ángel Castro belonged to the 20%.

Today the “Pareto Principle” has become a formula that is studied in marketing and in almost any activity: 20% of the causes generate 80% of the consequences. That is, 20%––more or less–– of products generates 80% of the sales. And 20% of the sellers support 80% of the sales. And so on.

The problem with Pareto’s observation is that it leads to inequality in income. Those who are part of the 20% receive a huge share of the money that society generates.

This is anathema to communists, determined that the results of all people are approximately the same, because they have not taken into account that human beings are different, have different dreams, and expect different remuneration, sometimes of an emotional character.

This means that it is not a matter of reforming the communist system, but of canceling it, and accepting willingly that some citizens live better than the average. It is not a question of making the three currencies disappear, or that children and adults can have a glass of milk when they want and not when central planning decides. It is about asking Cubans if they want to continue with communism or prefer to carry out their transactions as they are carried out in the thirty most prosperous countries in the world.

That’s the key.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

It was probably similar, although medical care today is better and there are antibiotics to treat bacterial infections that often arise after the attack of viruses. In any case, the conflicts were the same–there were people who refused to put on the face mask or to keep the so-called “social distancing.” Since the Middle Ages, it has been known that these two weapons, plus well-ventilated places, and body hygiene, were almost the only way to defend against epidemics.

When Trump predicts that one day the virus will magically disappear, he is not making it up, but observing what happened in 1920. After 15 terrible months, the H1N1 virus, helped by a fiery summer, vanished with relative ease, but back then aviation was in its infancy. Today it will not disappear until a high percentage of the population is vaccinated and antiviral cocktails are available and at affordable prices, as is the case with AIDS drugs.

I suspect that the H1N1 and Covid-19 political consequences will be very similar. In 1920 there were general elections in the United States. Although the country arrived late to the conflict, it left some 117,000 corpses in Europe (about a fifth of those taken by the pandemic). President Woodrow Wilson had to face the ruin brought by the pandemic and an insubordinate society that didn’t believe in the Head of State’s sagacity. Wilson had promised them that he would not allow himself to be dragged into the war by the bellicose Europeans and, in the end, attacks on the US merchant marine by German submarines, plus the well-known “Zimmermann telegram,” made him enter the war.

Wilson’s role as a winner in World War I was useless to him. The US Congress did not approve his famous “14 points,” nor was the country able to participate in the League of Nations. American society, perhaps fatigued by the pandemic and tired of the Democratic Party, elected Warren Harding, a Republican journalist from Ohio, as president. Harding took over a country that was near-bankrupt, but it soon recovered and gave way to the “roaring twenties.”

On that occasion, the Republicans had the greatest victory in history against the Democrats; they won the 1920 election by a margin of 26 points. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, still in the presidency, leaving his Vice President and successor Calvin Coolidge at the helm. In 1928, the also Republican Herbert Hoover, an engineer, won the presidential election. Hoover was an excellent civil servant who was surprised by the “crash” of the Stock Market in 1929. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated him, and the cycle of the Democrats began.

In 2020, a century after the previous pandemic, history repeats itself, but the other way around–the virus annihilates Donald Trump and the Republicans. There is some poetic justice in that defeat.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

I do not like Trump, because he is undoing the good relations of the United States with its best allies, such as France and Australia, probably because of his rude New York customs of a developer without “class.” With Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, he had an unnecessary run-in when the Frenchman questioned the current course of NATO under the erratic leadership of the American. With Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australia, he was worse: he hung up the phone when Turnbull demanded that he fulfill the commitment established by the previous president, Barack Obama, to accept a group of Syrian refugees. It was a commitment from the USA, not from the person who temporarily occupied the White House. Australia sent troops to the two world wars, to Korea to Vietnam and even to Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t like Trump because as despotic as he is with his allies, he is the opposite when it comes to Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea. I firmly believe, as the FBI suspects, that the Russians can blackmail him, not only with the mediation authorized by Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections (perhaps negotiated by Paul Manafort), but because of the lewd “golden shower” that he allegedly requested of two prostitutes on the bed in which Barack Obama had slept during an official visit to Moscow.

I don’t like Trump because he does not respect science and scientists, as shown in the management of the Covid-19 crisis by not wearing a mask, making fun of Biden for wearing one, and publicly recommending absurd remedies, which I hope he does not consider, because I wish him well, now that he and his wife have been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Likewise, this anti-scientific attitude is manifested in the treatment given to climate change and in believing that the result of all actions is measured in dollars and cents. This, simply, is not true.

I don’t like Trump because I am a Hispanic immigrant in the USA and he rejects us. It is not true that a good part of the Mexicans who cross the border are drug traffickers or rapists. They are usually Mexican and Central American peasants who cannot earn a living in their countries, or who are threatened with death by criminal gangs, attracted by the labor structures that they observe on the American side. They do the jobs that almost no one wants to do in the United States, and they contribute their work to keeping the country at the top of the planet.

I don’t like Trump, because the President doesn’t even feel empathy for the “Dreamers” and doesn’t want to grant them residency. This is about 800,000 sociological Americans who were brought to the United States by their parents and who are in immigration limbo. These young people have no other identity than an American one. In many cases they don’t even speak Spanish. (If Trump had been in the White House in the 1960s, Cuban refugees would not have been welcomed in the United States).

It is true that there are immigration laws, and that ever country must control its border, but these children were brought without their consent. There is a thing called “amnesty” which, previously, had been used by other presidents, like Ronald Reagan, and that have resolved the lives of these undocumented immigrants. Especially when we know that 63% of Americans (much better than their president) agree to open their arms to these “dreamers.”

I don’t like Trump because he does not grant a residence permit to Venezuelans or Nicaraguans knowing that the dictatorships of Maduro and Ortega are unforgiving towards Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.

I don’t like Trump because he did not annul Obama’s presidential decrees regarding Cuban family reunification, or the special program that admitted into the US “slaves in white coats,” the medical personnel “hired” by governments insensitive to the pain of others; or the measure of “wet foot-dry foot” measure that gave access to the persecuted who presented themselves to the US authorities.

I don’t like Trump because an American president must be absolutely spotless in his obligations to the Treasury, and the New York Times investigation showed that Trump was not. It also proved what the NY businessmen said sotto voce: he had failed as a businessman. He failed as a casino owner. He failed as a university entrepreneur. He failed as a otel owner. Instead, he was successful marketing himself on an NBC TV show that ran for years and earned more than 400 million dollars.

Last, I don’t like Trump, because I think nationalism is the origin of wars and the limitations of international commerce. Because I believe that the primary function of a Head of State is to unite society and it seems to me that we are facing a racist and white supremacist of the worst kind, as opined by Mary L. Trump, the President’s niece and a notable clinical psychologist in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

___________

Nota bene. Many years ago, I joined the ranks of the “independents” in the United States. Sometimes I have voted for Democrats and sometimes for Republicans. I would have loved it if the Republican candidate had been Jeb Bush, but he did not survive the primaries.

Fortunately for the record, I said it clearly in an article published in the NYT on October 13, 2014 ( Cuba Doesn’t Deserve Normal Diplomatic Relations). I did not like Obama’s break with the tradition of 10 presidents before him, Republicans and Democrats, of not making excessive concessions to the Cuban dictatorship as long as the Castros did not show a clear sign of amendment and did not embark on the road to democracy.

I didn’t like it at all because I don’t like being lied to, and Obama assured a thousand times that there would be no normal diplomatic relations until the island respected human rights, while his political operators secretly managed otherwise. Outcome? More repression within Cuba, a greater presence of Cuban intelligence in Venezuela and even the clandestine shipment of weapons and a plane to North Korea, violating all the agreements of the United Nations.

As a good liberal (in the European sense of the term), I usually endorse a combination between the conservative in fiscal matters (a limited state, a market and not a planned economy,  the least amount of taxes and public debt), and the American “liberal” in social matters (pro-choice, pro-immigration, and a state sufficiently secular to  comfortably accommodate agnostics).

On the other hand, I have lived 40 years in Europe and, previously, 18 years in Cuba, so I know first-hand the difference between a “Welfare State,” with its defects and its virtues, and a disgusting Communist dictatorship. No one is going to convince me that asking for health and education to be paid for through general budgets, as is the case in Scandinavian countries, and, to some extent, in Germany and Switzerland, is a symptom of totalitarianism. Perhaps it is a mistake, but that has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by Marx to set up his maddened and impoverishing scheme.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

If Maduro kills himself (or is killed) Rodríguez would move to Miraflores to rule over the remains of Venezuela. After all, he has been cheating since the 2004 revocatory referendum. Venezuelans perfectly remember how at 8 pm the quick count at the electoral polls, carried out by a very prestigious firm, revealed that 60% had voted to revoke Chávez, who was only supported by 40%.

But at 4 am, while the country slept, the results had magically been reversed and Jorge Rodríguez, on behalf of the CNE, proudly announced it. It was the first time that electronic machines had been used to commit fraud. Poor Jimmy Carter believed it and endorsed the monstrosity from the Carter Center in Atlanta.

The sanctions of the United States and of half the planet, including those of the very circumspect and discreet Switzerland, were closing the circle relentlessly. The last episode was the most serious. Four ships registered as Greek –Bella, Bering, Luna and Pandi– but with more than a million barrels of oil from Iran sent to Venezuela, were detained on the high seas and taken to Houston, Texas. There they were awaited by several companies that wanted the ships’ cargo to compensate for the debts not paid by PDVSA, as revealed by the expert Russ Dallen.

There is no money whatsoever in the Venezuelan coffers. There is no credit or ability to pay what is owed. Maduro can’t even trust the Bank of England. More than a billion dollars in gold bars, while this metal’s price rises, have been provisionally confiscated because the ruler recognized by the United Kingdom is Juan Guaidó, according to His Majesty’s Supreme Court.

That means that the US strategy is paying off. It was started by Obama, who was genuinely concerned about the ties between Venezuela and Iran, when the price of a barrel of oil was around a hundred dollars, and it has been followed by Donald Trump, now that the barrel is about a quarter of that value. This shows Maduro that it is useless to dream with a possible Trump defeat in the November 3 elections. The policy is bipartisan. If Biden wins, it wouldn’t make a big difference.

The US has figured out how to defeat almost all of its enemies without firing a single shot. True, it must put all its financial weight on the effort. It is not worth saying “but Cuba has not been defeated by the embargo.” If the United States had insisted on it with the same strength as against Venezuela, surely the results would have been different.

Elliot Abrams, a US diplomat in charge of centralizing government measures against Maduro’s Venezuela, is encouraging the opposition to join. The goal is to assemble a common front in the event that Maduro has decided to immolate himself in free elections because it is impossible to rule the country due to lack of resources. Maduro only had 30 million dollars a few days ago and gasoline to cover the most urgent needs. The purpose of that union is to tell Maduro that they would agree to participate in the elections, as long as they are organized by Luis Almagro and the OAS.

As we are talking about a gruesome regime (to understand the intensity of the disaster, you must read Castrochavismo Internacional: 20 years of ambition and destruction, compiled by academic María Teresa Romero) it should be considered to what extent it is necessary to agree with the narco-dictatorship to turn the page. Nobody has the moral or legal authority to decree an amnesty, but following the Spanish example after Franco’s death, it is possible to negotiate a temporary amnesia of eight or ten years and then … whatever God wants.

English text from El Blog de Montaner

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.