Category: Carlos Alberto Montaner

It is amazing to hear Pablo Iglesias, the leader of “Podemos” in Spain, be envious of what is happening in Venezuela, as if he were willing to repeat in his own country the terrible devastation that occurred in the once prosperous oil paradise.

I remember a young woman from Guayaquil screaming at me, incensed, that “in Ecuador we need a couple of Tirofijos.” She was referring to the Colombian bandit who caused so many losses to his native country. The incident took place at the Catholic University of Guayaquil. The appearance of the truculent girl – blonde, beautiful, green-eyed, well-dressed – was bourgeois.

Why did the Argentines interrupt the impetuous road to development and prosperity they had followed until Hipólito Yrigoyen was deposed by a fascist military coup in 1930? In Argentina there were problems, but none prevented the country from being part of the First World in almost all aspects, and especially in education. That coup was the prologue to Peronism and the total collapse of the Argentine miracle that had begun with the liberal Constitution of 1853.

Why was Fidel Castro not able to understand, in 1959 – when he, his brother Raúl, Che and another small group of communists clung to the Soviet model and chose the path of totalitarianism – that there were enough indications (for example, the German and Austrian miracle) that demonstrated the superiority of “liberal democracy” instituted by the economist Ludwig Erhard?

Such was Fidel’s ideological blindness that he was not even able to understand the example of his own father, Angel Castro, a humble Galician peasant, astute as a fox and laborious as an ant, who, when he died in 1957, bequeathed to his family capital of eight million dollars, an agricultural company that gave jobs to dozens of people, a school, and even a cinema run by Juanita Castro, a contemporary of Raúl, who has been exiled in Miami since the 1960s.

Sorman, who knows in depth the bloody history of Europe, rightly alleges that “in Europe the ancient nations, very different from each other for centuries, are gradually coming to an agreement on the best possible regime, liberal democracy.” While in Latin America “everyone cultivates their uniqueness, learns nothing from their neighbor and the exchanges are practically nonexistent.”

We are not able to perceive the leap towards modernity and development Chile has been given, today a country on the threshold of the First World through a fortunate combination of markets, private property, control of public spending, and national savings – thanks to the reviled pension plan created by the economist José Piñera – and freedoms.

Why do not we correct the shortcomings and adjust what is worth saving instead of undoing everything and moving to the other direction of the pendulum, as president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador promises to do in Mexico, to the terror of investors?

The United States, which unwittingly created “liberal democracy” after 1787, when it promulgated the country’s first and only Constitution, grew little by little, modifying the course with each election, wise to the extraordinary importance of placing everyone under the rule of law.

Will the example of Chile catch on? I don’t know. I hope so, but when one sees the destructive vocation of the left and the extreme right, what happens to Guy Sorman happens to you: you are overcome by total and absolute despair.

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If there is a right to petition for asylum, he has to respect it. Nor is it in Trump’s hands to snatch the citizenship of those born in the United States to foreign parents. It is an unconstitutional barbarity.

Not all of Trump’s actions, of course, are misguided. The appointment of diplomat John Bolton as head of the National Security Council was an intelligent maneuver. Bolton is a brilliant lawyer, Yale graduate, with a very long experience in international affairs and organizations. He has a Kantian vision of relations with other nations, founded on principles. He was one of the few heads that could replace General Herbert McMaster at the head of that organization. His work, and it is no small thing, will give meaning and form to the contradictory ideas and attitudes of Trump, a disconcerting person who admires Vladimir Putin and praises Kim Jong-un, while he (rightly) detests Nicolás Maduro.

John Bolton has just delivered one of his first keynote speeches. He has done it in Miami, in the Freedom Tower of Miami Dade College, the largest and most diverse university in the country (165,000 students, most of them Hispanic and African-American).

The event took place before Cuban-American congressmen Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Curbelo and 250 other prominent people, among whom were Venezuelan exiles (Asdrúbal Aguiar) and Nicaraguans, along with Cuban-Americans Lincoln Díaz-Balart (former congressman), Modesto Maidique, former president of Florida International University, Frank Calzón, of the Center for a Free Cuba, and Marcell Felipe, leader of Inspire América, an organization that, increasingly, is becoming the informal representation of the most active Cuban community in the United States.

Bolton delineated what Trump’s Latin American policy will be. It will continue the offensive of trade restrictions and punishments against corrupt people and companies and those key to sustaining the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, whose leaders he called “the three stooges” of socialism (Moe, Larry and Curly), without specifying which one is which.

In reality there are four stooges, because he did not mention Evo Morales, the despot of Bolivia, a nation with political prisoners, murdered adversaries, exiles, corruption with impunity, Morales’s attempts to perpetuate himself in power against the will of the voters, and the rest of the symptoms of an unmitigated tyranny.

One of Trump-Bolton’s successes has been transferring another notable lawyer, Mauricio Claver-Carone from the IMF to the National Security Council and putting him at the head of the Western Hemisphere, which includes all of Latin America. For the United States, it was (and is) crazy that such an important region of the planet should not have its place among the priorities of Washington’s foreign policy.

Claver-Carone, who regularly monitored the activities of the Cuban regime, knows that the script of the aggressive dictatorships of 21st Century Socialism is written in Havana, even though Cuban diplomat and intelligence officer Jesus Arboleya diligently tries to cover the sun with a finger.

As in the comedies of the Three Stooges, there is always one who doles out the slaps. He is the Moe of this tragicomedy. Remember? He used to discipline his brothers. He had an abundance of black hair partedin the middle. That role today belongs to Miguel Díaz-Canel, the Cuban puppet president.

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The objective was to put the development of Cuba’s Mariel Port in the hands of Odebrecht, knowing that the island could not repay the loan. A substantial part of that credit returned to Brazil in the pockets of corrupt politicians. It was the slice that Odebrecht distributed clandestinely, paid for with the taxes of the mocked Brazilian people. The project, by the way, carried out by a developer that would charge reasonable profits, cost half the amount paid to the Brazilian company.

Despite this filthiness, Lula headed the polls until the courts forbade him to run for president. After this impediment for corruption, imposed by Sergio Moro, an exemplary judge who set up the criminal investigation called the Lava Jato, and who has faced the political mafias of the Workers’ Party with enormous courage, Lula has chosen Professor Fernando Haddad to replace him. Haddad is a radical political professor, former failed mayor of Sao Paulo, also with pending charges of corruption against him. Simultaneously, he has recruited the young journalist Manuela d’Avila, deputy star of the Communist Party of Brazil, as Haddad’s vice president. The selection of the pair shows how things really work. Capital is terrified and is running out of the country through all the available holes. As has been said so many times, “there is no animal more cowardly than a million dollars.”

At the other end of the electoral spectrum, Jair Bolsonaro, the candidate of the right in October’s upcoming elections, a former captain of paratroopers, doesn’t respect the current legality too much either. He speaks with nostalgia of the time of the military dictatorship, justifies the torture, at the time had phrases of praise for Hugo Chávez, and regretted that the army had not shot 30,000 people, including former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whom he accused of connivance with the Workers’ Party. Meanwhile, former General Hamilton Mourao, his vice president, mumbles badly about the chances of a coup if they lose the election for alleged fraud. Some in Brazil call Bolsonaro the Brazilian Trump. May God have mercy on our souls.

It is very possible that we are again entering a populist cycle. Macri in Argentina could lose power as a result of the economic crisis. Haddad could defeat Bolsonaro and establish a leftist populist regime. Or Bolsonaro could defeat Haddad — they are tied in the polls — and start a kind of right-wing populist  of a republic. Andrés Manuel López Obrador has legitimately won the Mexican elections and is not expected to govern with prudence.

In Latin America, all the the evil dictators — Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, Evo Morales, Raul Castro and his handpicked Diaz-Canel — don’t even have to sit patiently at the doors of their houses and wait for the corpses of their enemies to pass by. All they have to do is entrench themselves in power and wait for a new populist cycle. Which we are in.

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All this increases uncertainty and distrust. Those who do not have access to dollars acquire valuable pictures, precious stones, gold or anything that retains some international value. I have seen fortunes in postage stamps, spurs for fighting cocks, race horses and even curious relics, false or real, like the fragments of Napoleon’s testicles, carefully amputated by Dr. Francesco Antomarchi in Santa Helena, the Mallorcan doctor who autopsied the corpse and ruled that the emperor died of stomach cancer at age 51.

What is Daniel Ortega’s next move? He knows he has to face the polls, but he is waiting for his image and that of his Government to improve. That will never happen. The problem is that everything he does aggravates and worsens his personal situation and the perception of his regime. The Organization of American States (OAS) ruled that it is a repugnant dictatorship that kills without compassion. The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), after a visit by its president, reported that the rights of the people are violated without compassion. There is no human way to improve that image, unless he announces his decision to advance the elections and leave the country or stay, if he has the delicate talent that is required to agree on a negotiated solution with the opposition.

Although it seems incredible, the worst is yet to come. And the worst is the nationalization of Nicaragua’s weak productive capacity. I do not know if Daniel still believes in the Cuban model of the eighties, which was in force when he first took power with the Sandinistas, because he was a very ignorant young man, but Cuba, which has lost its compass after 60 years of failures, no longer believes in it and is trying various formulas to bury the Revolution without it being noticed and without losing power, two impossible missions.

If I were a Nicaraguan, along with the departure of Daniel, I would be thinking about what to do to prevent further revolutions and setbacks. A substantial part of what was achieved after the defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 has gone by the wayside. All of the work undertaken to overcome Nicaragua’s bankruptcy, to straighten out its finances, to end hyperinflation, to fix the wounds and to begin to grow again, has been lost.

It is a shame that every so often a catastrophe like this occurs and overthrows coexistence. Well-functioning nations have remarkable human capital and functioning institutions. They are not governments of special men, but of laws that apply to everyone equally and in which one ascends not by one’s connections but by one’s merits.

Is there a country that has shined a light on this exhausting exercise? Yes. Switzerland did it in 1848, after the liberal revolution. They decided never to export mercenaries, to participate in wars, or to become poor again. They dropped out of stupidity. Today very few people know the name of the president of Switzerland. Nor do they need to.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

Why is Mexico moving to the left, against the imaginary pendulum, when almost all of Latin America seems to be moving in the other direction? Probably, because of AMLO who, despite being a politician of the system (he has been a member of the PRI and the PRD), has some of the attributes of the caudillo outsider, and the fact that the vast majority of Mexicans are tired of traditional politicians incapable of alleviating the very serious problems of increasing violence and great corruption.

Also, because Mexico is a country only lightly related to Latin America. It has its rich pre-Columbian history, its powerful colonial viceroyalty and its republican history without Simón Bolívar and without José de San Martín. It has its cuisine, its myths, its literature, its cinema, its music, and, ultimately, its rich and varied culture at the service of the almost 130 million Mexicans who live in the country and many of the 40 million located in the United States.

To which is added a remarkable phenomenon: the only foreign nation that really influences Mexico’s social mentality is the United States. Not withstanding that in two slashes the United States took half of Mexico’s territory. The first cut was Texas in 1836, and the second, ten years later, was the rest of what is now the southwestern US, including California.

Neither Spain, which is the distant past of the gachupines (native Spaniards in Mexico), nor Latin America, with whom the country shares a language and many features of a common identity bequeathed by the Motherland, are present in the daily life of Mexicans. The Mexican obsession is the United States.

I remember that, after participating in a seminar with Samuel Huntington at Harvard organized by Larry Harrison, the American thinker expressed his concern about the strong Mexican presence in the west of the country, given that they might eventually try to link to Mexico. I was then invited to give a lecture in Monterrey and, when I finished, I explained and asked my Mexican listeners about Huntington’s conjecture.

My hosts laughed. Had neither Huntington nor I had heard of the Tex-Mex world, very rich in culinary and musical expressions? It was the other way around: what could happen, according to them, was that one day northern Mexico would ask for its annexation to the United States. There was, they said, a very strong force of attraction from Texas that made residents of Monterrey feel more emotionally close to the Texan culture than to Mexico City.

In short, who is afraid of AMLO and why? Fearing him, with reason, are employers and society’s elite. The fear comes from his inveterate addiction to promising subsidies. AMLO’s populist features arouse the terror of business groups and domestic and foreign investors. He will raise public spending to terrible levels.

Many assume he could be another Hugo Chávez. I do not think so. He doesn’t seem as foolish. I suspect he will choose another mode of disaster, but one less severe. Maybe it will be like the first term of Peru’s Alan García, or the initial years of Venezuelan Rafael Caldera’s second term, until reality made him change direction.

The unfortunate thing is that his term will overlap with that of Donald Trump. A right-wing populist and a left-wing populist will mutually reinforce their worst instincts. In any case, Trump must be thinking of adding thirty feet to his border wall while AMLO is thinking nothing will be done to stop the flood of emigrants. The train crash is all but certain.

*Translator’s note: There are no run-offs in Mexican presidential elections. The highest vote getter wins, even without a majority. The president serves only one six-year term.

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The students abandoned them. It is touching to witness on YouTube the harsh words directed to the presidential couple by the university student Lesther Lenin Alemán. He speaks, without saying so, in the name of all the universities, because the universities have also abandoned them. Daniel’s and La Chayo’s mobs and police entered the Central American University in Managua and the School of Engineering with blood and fire.

That has had repercussions outside of Nicaragua. From the prestigious Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala, vice-chancellor Javier Fernández-Lasquetty has written a great article for the Spanish press in which he asks for solidarity with Nicaragua, the poorest nation in Central America.

The businessmen grouped in the Higher Council of Private Enterprise (Cosep) have abandoned him. A few hours ago they asked all their members to dissociate themselves from the government. They were grateful that the Ortega-Murillo couple had abandoned the stupid collectivist impulses that had destroyed the economy in that first stage of youthful fury (the country still has not recovered the growth rates of 1979, when they overthrew Somoza), but that gratitude was not enough to accept in silence the barbarous repression unleashed against a people who exercised their right to protest.

Is it worth listing all the foreign entities and people that have condemned the couple’s crimes? The US Embassy, ​​Amnesty International, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the 14 countries of the Lima Group, the neighboring and very civilized Costa Rica, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Marco Rubio, Thor Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation, José Miguel Vivanco’s Human Rights Watch, and a very long et cetera.

Who supports Ortega and Murillo? Barely the stubble that remains of 21^st Century socialism: the Cuba of Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel, the Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro, and the Bolivia of Evo Morales, all in different phases of serious economic and political crises. Not even Gustavo Petro, the Colombian presidential candidate in that camp, dares to back them. What they do is too repulsive.

It is likely that Daniel Ortega and his wife still have the ammunition and lack of scruples to continue killing for some time, but if what they are trying to do is recover the legitimacy that is needed to exercise power in this era, there is no method that can deliver it.

Capital has begun to flee the country. We are seeing how the country becomes more impoverished every day. There are already reports that tourism has been paralyzed by 80%. The same will happen in other areas of the productive machinery. Nobody in his right mind would invest in such a place, where there are no vestiges of a Rule of Law.

The couple’s own daughter, Camila Ortega Murillo, and Shantall Lacayo, founders of Nicaragua Diseña, have had to withdraw from an innocent Miami Fashion Week event due to the protests of Nicaraguan exiles. That is just a symptom of the wave that is coming.

We will observe an accelerated decline of the presidential couple until they leave the government because of the violence, perhaps removed by the military, as happened in Ceausescu’s Romania, or perhaps because of an insurrectional spasm of society, as has happened in the country in the past.

The terrible thing is that this bitter end could be avoided if Daniel and his wife acted sensibly and withdrew from power before their house of cards totally collapses. Is that asking to squeeze blood from a stone? I do not know. There is not a hint of greatness in their stubborn resistance. It is very sad what happens in Nicaragua.

*Translator’s note: “Chayo” is a common Nicaraguan nickname for Rosario.

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However, the Communist Party has never made any important decisions. It’s just a transmission belt of Castros’ orders and whims. Like the three monkeys of the Chinese fable: it has not seen, it has not heard, it has not thought. Even worse, there is a fourth monkey: it has not even known.

Raúl also controls the Parliament (the National Assembly of People’s Power) through Esteban Lazo, its president. Mariela, Raúl’s daughter, is one of the 605 assembly members known in Cuba as “the singing children of Havana” because of their amazingly fine tuning. They have never played a jarring note. Of these, 31 are members of the State Council, supposedly it is the Sanhedrin who has appointed Diaz-Canel and who can dismiss him easily.

However, the country’s real authority is in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), purged by Raúl in 1989 for fear of a conspiracy. The FAR and the MININT have been filled with raulistas. Raúl Castro was Minister of the Armed Forces from 1959 until 2006, when his brother became seriously ill.

Raúl has formed and deformed the armed forces. He has appointed all the officers in command and filled them with privileges. He has even looked after the economic destiny of retired friends by assigning them to positions in the dollar area, which is the only habitable area.

As often happens with bosses, although everyone says they love him, there are many who hate him. That is why there is a photograph of Raúl giving a talk in a barracks while wearing an armored vest under his shirt. He has always been a distrustful and cautious person.

Raúl expects his successor to square the circle. Raúl wants him to maintain the system and fix or alleviate the problems of Cuban society. That’s impossible. The misery, the lack of productivity, the decadence and the despair of the Cubans are due, precisely, to the system. Nothing can be fixed if that insane asylum is kept.

Cubans want to be free to choose the movies, the books, the ideologies or the politicians that satisfy them. They even want the freedom to be apolitical and not have to repeat the revolutionary chatter imposed by a few dogmatic individuals. That’s what Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas said after he managed to escape from Cuba and was asked what was the best part of being exiled: “to show my own face for the first time,” he answered with a certain melancholy.

Cubans want to show their true faces. They want to be able to work in activities that allow them to live better, to eat what they want and not what the commissaries decide, to travel and see the world. Cuba is the only country in the world where doctors, teachers, engineers, any professional, do not live at least as middle class, unless they belong to the nucleus of power.

Today, in the economic field, those who receive remittances in dollars from family abroad can live somewhat better, as well as those who rent rooms to foreigners in remodeled houses, the girls who prostitute themselves, some self-employed workers who use their old cars to drive tourists around, and the individuals who have obtained a license to operate family restaurants known as paladares.

That is, those who live and work in the dollar area are better off, but how many people have that privilege: 5% or 10% of a population of 11 million? The Cuban peso lacks purchasing power and 90% of the nation receive their salaries or their pensions in Cuban pesos. Raul Castro did not dare to face the problem, leaving Diaz-Canel the poisoned inheritance of unifying the currency.

How is that done? Floating the Cuban peso and liberalizing prices, which would create terrible inflation and economic chaos that would last between 18 and 24 months.

At that point, presumably, Raul will have died and suddenly the only source of real authority and personal loyalty will have disappeared. Then anything could happen. Then, Diaz-Canel might even show his true face.

Translation from Latin American Herald Tribune

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A few months ago, Cuban State Security circulated a supposedly leaked video, in which D-C recited a very conservative collectivist catechism, conceived for three purposes – to engage the heir with those reactionary positions, to reassure the small group of Stalinists around Raúl, and to downgrade Cuban society’s multiple expectations of reform, so that no one is excited about the change. The Leopard’s formula maintains its validity in Cuba – if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

What does Raúl Castro intend to do with this non-change? He intends to make possible the inevitable arrival to power of a new generation, born after the triumph of the Revolution (D-C is a 57-year old “kid”), but with the condition that they don’t make substantial changes to the regime created by his brother Fidel and a handful of henchmen. Like all dictators, Raúl would like time to stop in the moment in which he and his brother won a place in history. Simultaneously, he tries to assure his family and his friends that fate will be benevolent with them when he is not there to guarantee it. After all, he will be 87 years old very soon.

Is all that possible? Of course not.

All the conditions are in place for a change of regime to occur. First, the feeling of failure is widespread. The system’s lack of productivity is overwhelming. None of the parameters of a minimum quality of life resists the slightest analysis: housing, electricity, transportation, food, drinking water, clothing. Cuba has regressed in almost all aspects of existence. Adding to those problems are the constant fear, the absence of rights and the unpleasant need to lie, a need all Cubans have in order to survive in a totalitarian society. Living in Cuba is not pleasant neither materially nor emotionally. That’s why young people dream of leaving the country.

When will the regime change begin? The first step is when D-C becomes president. Although he repeatedly swears that he will be loyal to the Castros’ legacy, and even if he believes he will, the administrative environment of the country and society as a whole would like a radical transformation as soon as possible. What does this transformation consist of? Essentially, it would free the nation’s productive forces, unleashing the hands of entrepreneurs so they are able to create and accumulate wealth, invest and be powerful, even if the superstition of egalitarianism ends up impoverished.

The idea of a central economic nucleus, managed by the state and administered by the military, with around 2,500 companies that generates foreign currency, lacks spontaneity, flexibility and is a sure path to the disaster that lies in the accounting records, as audits have demonstrated. The model of Castro’s “guidelines” does not work. The idea of a private self-employed sector dedicated to serving the state as a taxpayer and as an employer of supernumerary workers that pay taxes is foolish.

After 60 years of nonsense Cubans know that there is no substitute for the market, economic freedom and private property. They also know that, despite its imperfections, the only system which can guarantee the organized transmission of authority, and that can be purged and transformed without violence, is the state under the rule of law that emerged from the Enlightenment, either as a republic or as a parliamentary monarchy. That’s the only way, even if D-C is against it. That’s the way of history.

Note: Translation is from the Latin American Herald

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The 1960s brought race riots, Vietnam and government lies. In the 1970s, Nixon imploded, and at the end of the decade, in the Carter era, bank interest rates climbed to 20 percent, the economy suffered from “stagflation” and it seemed that the period of democracy was coming to an end, overrun by Soviet collectivism. A little later, however, Mikhail Gorbachev buried the Soviet Union and communism was relegated to two loony bins without any real importance: Cuba and North Korea. (In China and Vietnam today we find another genre of dictatorship, distanced from Marxist superstitions.)

In the United States, people’s life expectancy has risen, as has happened in almost the whole world, sparked, in large part, by the country’s medical discoveries. Homes are larger and are furnished with all kinds of electrical appliances (even among the poorest social groups); food, including junk food, is so abundant and so cheap that the country’s great problem is not hunger but obesity and a progressive increase in diabetes.

The poor — approximately 15 percent of the population — are poor because a family of four receives “only” about $24,000 a year, plus food stamps. Everyone — the poor, the middle class and the rich — has access to electricity, the Internet, drinking water, clothing, cell phones, transportation, schools, state or private universities that award scholarships to the best students and loans to almost everyone, police protection, reasonably efficient judicial systems and opportunities to work and move ahead.

True, the United States has problems, but they have always existed. It is a free society, complex and plural, with 325 million inhabitants, of whom more than 42 million are Afro-Americans and more than 57 million are Hispanics, whose representatives maintain order with a much discussed and debated punitive strategy where approximately three million are incarcerated.

It is also true that the quality of students decreases while the cost of tuition increases, but the country has the 25 best university and research centers on the planet. Simultaneously, there is no universal health insurance, medicines are expensive and malignant drugs cause deadly damage (never better said). The latter — the drugs — are linked to the fact that in some cities there are areas of extreme violence with very high rates of homicide. However, the United States remains a fundamentally free country and one full of opportunities.

That explains why millions of human beings try to settle in this country. There is no better index of the relative quality of a society than the presence of immigrants. The United States is a magnet because the American Dream is alive. As it was in Venezuela until Chavismo came. As it was in Cuba until Castro crushed the dream that one could prosper through one’s own efforts. As it was in Argentina, until Peronism ruined that great nation with its populist message, intermingled with fascism. The immigration balance of these three countries was very favorable until the ideological stupidity and barbarism destroyed the productive apparatus and pulverized coexistence.

It is true that there are places where life is better in some aspects than in the United States (half of Europe, including Spain, perhaps in Israel or Japan, because quality of life does not depend only on material issues), but perhaps in none of them can immigrants can establish themselves like in the USA, where in the last elections two senators, children of immigrants, aspired to the presidency, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, while the story of newcomers and their descendants who succeed is repeated again and again as a permanent mantra.

In the 15th Century, the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique, moved by the death of his father, Rodrigo, wrote a great poem with a melancholy ill-thought verse: “Any time in the past was better.” Not true. In those societies, such as the United States, where an institutional continuity exists despite the reversals and bad junctures, they manage to prosper in a constant manner, making themselves true progressives, an adjective that countries and parties that progress least often usurp.

Probably that obsessive pursuit of a mythical Golden Age that Trump keeps repeating in his speeches has to do with a characteristic of the conservative personality. Conservatives tend to be pessimists. They invariably see the glass half empty and become frightened when they see an ethnically diverse society, more tolerant in sexual and religious matters, in which the norms of behavior, from strident and rude music to tattoos, are very different from what they learned in a safe childhood of white and Christian homes.

Conservatives associate the profile of society with their own biography. In the past, they were young and handsome. Today, they are old, wrinkled and ugly. The past was better, they believe. That’s not true. It was different. Another poet, a singer named Joaquín Sabina, has expressed it in a very popular song: “There’s no worse nostalgia than longing for what never happened.” This is what is happening to Donald Trump.

Note: Portions of this translation taken from The Latin American Herald.

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The 14ymedio team is committed to serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for joining us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time by becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue to transform journalism in Cuba.

In reality, two thirds of the world’s population are much closer to the “shitty” people than to Norwegians. A lax description of the societies in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, China, the Arab and sub-Saharan nations, a part of Europe, Russia and Latin America would elicit from Trump the same offensive definition he utilized for Salvadorans, Haitians and Africans.

In any case, it is absurd to think that the solution to problems is in social homogeneity. Sharing a single race, a single religion, a single language only guarantees us boredom, monotony and abuse. That’s the road to Nazism and the extermination of different people. The glorious message of republican ideas and parliamentary monarchies is that diversity is not only inevitable but also very convenient.

The 1790 census in the United States tallied roughly 4 million white Americans, almost all of English and Irish origin, and half a million black slaves. Only a handful of native Americans remained, and they weren’t even counted. In 2018, we have 325 million people, of whom 72 percent are white, 13 percent black and 16 percent Hispanic, a strange definition that is attributable to the European colonizer.

This enormous leap has been achieved while the country rose to the head of the planet. In 1890, the United States already was the world’s largest economy. After more than a century, it continues to be, although it grows at the rate of only 2 percent a year. This means that, at least until today, the machine that turns “shitty” people into productive and wealth-producing citizens has worked splendidly, an extreme that should not surprise us. The species is the same. What changes is the circumstances, the incentives and the institutions.

The children of the Polish or Russian peasants, in numerous cases born in tiny Jewish villages, or shtetls, became renowned doctors, lawyers and scholars of all kinds. The Indians, fragmented into 200 castes in their homeland, were the segment with the highest level of income in the United States. The second generation of Cubans, whose fathers had turned their island into an unproductive collectivist disaster, attained a high degree of education and economic performance.

What I mean to say is that the United States does not need Norwegians. It needs institutions, fair laws, opportunities for newcomers to develop, and moral and material incentives for individual enterprise. If that holds, the Haitians will slowly become Norwegians, even though they’ll keep their ethnic features.

After all, today’s admirable Norwegians were once fierce Vikings, crass and brutal, who had a bad habit of spitting into the bathtub where they washed off the blood and mud that covered them after they exterminated their adversaries. That’s when the Norwegians were shitty people.

Note: Translation from El Blog de Montaner

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The modus operandi was simple. The Odebrecht men detected a candidate with possibilities and began to negotiate. Brazil had large advertising and magnificent campaign cabinets. That great expertise was placed at the service of the person chosen together with important amounts to cover the cost of the operation.

All that the candidate had to do, once elected at the polls, was to approve the large budgets and entrust Odebrecht with the execution of the planned public works. The enormous amount was paid for by the taxes paid by the people or by loans that would have to be faced someday.

The Odebrecht Brazilians, on the other hand, did a good job on the roads, tunnels or whatever, and took care to pay seriously what was agreed to in Switzerland, in Andorra or in some other tax haven, carefully organizing the logistics of corruption. They kept their word. Theirs was not to deceive politicians or to rob the thieves, but to provide them with the famous secret slogan of “steal, but produce,” while increasing the turnover year after year.

You could trust the words of mobsters endowed with silk ties and five thousand dollar suits. They lacked ideological color. Without the slightest scruple they agreed with Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro or the Ecuadorian Jorge Glas, Rafael Correa’s vice president — apostles of 21st Century Socialism — natural enemies of the private market economy, of which the Odebrecht company was the quintessence.

The problem, of course, is not Odebrecht, but the mentality that prevails in Latin America. On a more modest scale, it is like this, through bribes, small or large, that most of our governments have worked since time immemorial, with a terrible aggravation: our societies do not care. Corruption appears at the end of the list of the evils that should be eradicated in most surveys. In Mexico they have come to affirm, seriously, that “corruption is just another way of distributing income.”

Why does this lack of principles happen in our world? Maybe, because most of the Ibero-Americans — including the Brazilians — do not perceive clearly that public money is contributed by all of us and corruption is as if they had put their hands in our pockets and stolen our wallets. What happens with the State does not concern us.

Perhaps, because the cynicism is total and we take for granted that the government is going to steal and it does not worry us, as long as it is “our own” that is enriched with the resources of others. We are victims of a clear moral anomie.

Undoubtedly, because patronage, that small bribe granted by the government, is a form of corruption, a type of harmful behavior, in which millions of Latin Americans are trained.

That is why it is not surprising that, despite Lava Jato (Wash the Calf), as the judicial operation against corruption was called in Brazil, once again they chose Lula da Silva, who today heads the polls despite his dirty business. Years ago the Peronists in neighboring Argentina said in a graffiti that time has not erased and that reveals the drama at the heart of it: “Sodomite or thief we want Perón.”

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The surveys show pro-Spain voters in a slight majority, generally contented with liberal democracy (which, I admit, pleases me) dispersed in a broad framework that ranges from the conservative right of the Popular Party to the leftist Socialist Workers Party of Spain, which occasionally is vegetarian and social-democratic, although sometimes it experiences carnivore spasms and bites in radical hunger. Add to this the liberal center of Ciudadanos (Citizens), the group that might earn the most votes, which in no way guarantees that it will be able to form a government. The right is inconvenienced by its existence and the left detests it.

Although the purpose of the elections is to give a legitimate government to a region whose bosses have been ousted for violating the existing legality, Tyrians and Trojans (though they will not officially admit it) will interpret the outcome as if it were a nonbinding plebiscite on independence and we’ll go back to the starting point. Childish though it may seem, there is no emotion more powerful and tenacious than nationalism. Trying to decapitate it is futile; it always reappears. So, the wisest course is to learn to coexist with the phenomenon and keep the blood from spilling into the river.

That is why I believe the reasonable thing to do is to open a Constitutional door to the pro-sovereignty crowd so they can leave, if they ever manage to permanently build a majority decisive enough to achieve their separatist objective.

I see Catalonia as part of an unequal Spain, created in olden days with different contributions, so I’d love to see it remain inside the common nation, but — because it’s a sentimental, not a legal issue — the most important factor is how the Catalans see themselves, not how we see them from the outside.

It’s like a divorce. It took the Spaniards (and some Latin Americans) far too long to admit that the decision to remain together belongs to the married couple, not the family. Any region of Spain should be given the chance to separate from the whole of the government to which it belongs. (Five regions are essentially differentiated: Catalonia, the Basque provinces, Galicia, the Canary Islands and the vast Spanish zone that includes the rest of the country.) Most likely, that “open door,” far from exacerbating the recurring calls for independence, will tone them down.

Because I know the history of Cuba, I know that Spain’s refusal to replicate the relaxed relationship between the United Kingdom and Canada sparked the final and definitive War of Independence. Perhaps a larger dose of self-government for Cuba might have prevented the war, the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine and the disaster of 1898.

Cuba — especially Havana — was and felt reasonably Spanish, but the politicians in Madrid made that relationship impossible, perhaps because of the uncontrollable turbulence of a nation that in a few years went through the trauma of the end of the Bourbon dynasty, the enthronement of a luckless Italian prince, the chaos of the First Republic, and the shady deals of the Restoration. There wasn’t enough tranquillity to act wisely.

Of course, the secession of any Spanish region would have to be a rational and consensual decision within a law that took into account a measure that would affect future generations. That would require a pro-independence majority of 60 percent, the approval in two consecutive plebiscites held during two separate legislative sessions to prevent conjuctural and insufficiently pondered reactions, and the economic consequences of any rupture, which must be previously analyzed. The parties must determine how the common goods will be divided and who will pay for the onerous cost of separation. Exactly the same as happens in any civilized divorce.

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Since then, Raúl has governed with his familial retinue. With his daughter Mariela, a restless and plain-speaking sexologist. With his son, Col. Alejandro Castro Espín, educated in the KGB’s intelligence schools. With his grandson and bodyguard Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, son of Deborah. With his son-in-law or former son-in-law (nobody knows if he’s still married to Deborah or if they divorced), Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, head of GAESA, the main holding of the Cuban chiefs of staff.

Those are the people who govern with Raúl, but they have three very serious problems. The most important is that very few believers in the system remain in Cuba. Sixty years of disaster are too many to stay faithful to that folly. Raúl himself lost his confidence in the system in the 1980s, when he sent many army officers to European centers to learn management and marketing techniques.

Why should the Cuban brass learn those disciplines well? To implement the “Military Capitalism of State,” Cuba’s only and devastating intellectual contribution to post-communism. The State reserves to itself the 2,500 midsize and major enterprises of the productive apparatus (hotels, banks, rum distilleries, breweries, cement factories, steel plants, ports and airports, etc.) directed by high-ranking military or former military officers. When these people cannot directly exploit an industry for lack of capital or expertise, they bring in a foreign partner to whom they promise ample profits, all the while watching him as if he were the worst of enemies.

Simultaneously, ordinary Cubans are barred from creating major businesses. They must limit themselves to running small places of service (restaurants), baking pizzas, frying croquettes or frying themselves driving taxis. They are forbidden to accumulate wealth or invest in new businesses, because the objective is not for entrepreneurial individuals to display their talent and keep the profits but to come up with the manual labor that the State cannot provide. In contrast with China, making money is a crime in Cuba. In other words, the worst of both worlds: statism controlled by the army brass and microcapitalism bound hands and feet.

The second problem is that the Communist Party means nothing to almost anyone in Cuba. In theory, communist parties are segregated by a doctrine (Marxism) that, after losing all meaning, turns the CP into a purely ritual affair. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union. Because nobody believed in the system, the CP was terminated by decree and 20 million people went home without shedding a tear.

The third is that Raúl is a very old man (86) who has promised to retire from the presidency on Feb. 24 next year, although he will probably remain ensconced in the party. In any case, how long can he live? Fidel lasted 90 years, but all you need to do is read his final screeds to understand that he had lost many of his faculties. The oldest Castro sibling, Ramón, died at age 91 but had spent many years crippled by senile dementia.

The sum of those three factors foretell a violent ending for Castroism, maybe at the hands of some army officer, unless Raúl Castro’s heir (officially Miguel Díaz Canel, the first vice president, but it could be someone else) opts for a true political opening and dismantles the system in an organized manner, to prevent a collapse that will destroy that fragile power structure.

That’s what the electoral process is supposed to do, but the Raulists have already barred the way to a hundred or so oppositionists who are willing to participate in the next election, while rejecting the referendum proposed by Rosa María Payá, daughter of Oswaldo Payá, a leader assassinated for asking for the same thing his daughter, bravely, is pleading for today.

In other words, Raúl will bequeath to his successor a terrible jolt. The dynasty will die with him.

Translation taken from Interamerican Institute for Democracy