Category: Carlos Alberto Montaner

The US president was not fazed. He will speak openly about human rights during his visit to Cuba. He has said it and he is going to do it. But there is more: Barack Obama, apparently, will not visit Fidel Castro. (Beware: never say never to this dictator.) At least for now he will inhibit the anthropological curiosity that this Tyrannosaurus Rex always awakens. Today he is a hunched caricature of himself, but there is a certain morbid fascination about conversing with a historic gentleman who has had the ingenuity to spend 60 years flitting through the news programs.

Obama, what’s more, will have the generosity to meet with some of the democrats of the opposition. There is a whole message there. It is a good lesson for the Argentine President Mauricio Macri, who has not yet been, and for French President Francois Hollande, who already passed through Havana and didn’t have the civic courage to make a gesture of solidarity with the dissidents. Obama will meet with the most hard line. He will give his blessing to the fighters. The most beaten up and toughened. Those whom the political police falsely classify as terrorists and CIA agents.

In any case, I think Obama has misjudged the hornet’s nest he has gotten himself into. He has unilaterally decreed the end of the Cold War with Cuba, despite the fact that the island insists on supporting the North Koreans militarily, supporting the terrorists of the Middle East, backing Syrian Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian ayatollahs. Nor does it matter that it directs the orchestra of the countries of 21^st Century Socialism (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua), all of them decidedly anti-American and determined to revive the battle left unfinished by the USSR.

Obama feels invulnerable. He is riding an enormous elephant, the largest history has ever known, and from his perspective as the primary planetary power these quaint Latin American dwarfs are like fleas that will naturally be crushed by the weight of an inevitable and overwhelming reality.

It could happen, but there is a serious problem of logic. At the Summit of the Americas in Panama, Obama declared that the United States had renounced trying to change the Cuban regime while, simultaneously, saying it would continue to promote the defense of human rights and a Western democratic vision. This is a clear contradiction.

The Castros’ dictatorship violates human rights precisely because it subscribes to the Leninist viewpoint that they are subterfuges of the callous capitalist bourgeoisie. They do not believe in them. “The Revolution” subscribes to other values, expressed in the so-called “social rights,” and, to achieve them, grants the Communist Party the sole and total direction of society. That is what the Constitution says, inspired by the one Stalin imposed on the USSR in the thirties

When a Cuban freely expresses her opinion and it contradicts the communist dogma, she is not exercising the right to free expression of thought, but committing a crime. When two or more Cubans try to get together to defend their ideals or interests outside of official channels, they are not exercising the right of assembly. They are committing a crime.

These outrages will not end as long as there is no change of regime on the island. It is clear that the vast majority of Cubans living in their own country will look on this visit with great enthusiasm. It is possible that the thaw will improve living conditions for some Cubans. And it is more than likely that certain US exporters will benefit from the opening of this famished market, but the bill will ultimately be paid by US taxpayers.

Nevertheless, there will be no freedoms, nor respect for human rights, nor will there be an end to militant anti-Americanism and the spirit of the Cold War, as long as the totalitarian regime continues and is not replaced by a real democracy. And that, painfully, means that unilateral concessions will continue to be made with no cost to the dictatorship. Appeasement has never been a good policy, as has been confirmed in North Korea with the dynasty founded by Kim Il-Sung, and as we have already seen in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Bullies confuse kindness with weakness.

The White House wants to hinder any involution of the measures taken, if after the November elections a candidate wins who is averse to having good trade relations with the Cuban regime.

It is highly significant that a US government spokesman has declared that Obama does not intend to visit Fidel Castro. It is a gesture of the desire to emphasize his lack of connection with the ideology of the dictatorship. At the end of the day, he was born after the Bay of Pigs and most of his career has been spent after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is the first truly post-Soviet president of the United States.

Apart from the anthropological curiosity of a visit to the old tyrant, who is no longer head of state, but a gentleman encased in a tracksuit who says some very odd things, being photographed with him and listening to his infinite nonsense (now aggravated by age and infirmity), is a part of the well-known political ritual that, subliminally, conveys a message of solidarity or, at least indifference, to the second oldest military dynasty on the planet. The first is North Korea.

Obama does not want to make this mistake. He will meet instead with members of “civil society.” This expression includes the opposition. Perhaps he will talk with the journalist Yoani Sánchez, with the opponents García Pérez “Antúnez,” Cuesta Morua, and Antonio Rodiles, with the very brave Ladies in White who, every Sunday, march peacefully while the political police insult and attack them. The purpose is obvious: to give support to democratic pluralism.

Raul Castro, meanwhile, feels that he is participating in a contradictory and dangerous game. Obama has unilaterally declared the end of the Cold War in the Caribbean, although Havana continues to man the battle stations.

The activities of the Forum of Sao Paulo, the anti-American strategy of the countries that conform to 21^st Century Socialism under the leadership of Cuba, the transfer of arms to North Korea in violation of UN agreements, and the unconditional support of Middle East terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, are some signs of that old subversive anti-Yankee mentality that the Castros have never wanted to renounce.

General James Clapper, Director of US National Intelligence, said officially on 9 February in an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee: from the perspective of espionage, Cuba was one of the four most dangerous countries for the United States. The other three were Russia, China and Iran.

Hours later, the island returned an American missile carrying secret technologies that had been sent to Havana “by mistake” from a European airport. During the 18 months of the “mistake” the rocket had been in the hands of Cuban intelligence. In this period, experts assume, Raul Castro’s government had had time to copy it, sell it or share it with its anti-American allies.

What is Raul Castro going to do with the olive branch Obama has given him? Is he going to cancel the hallmarks of the Cuban Revolution and admit that he has been mistaken almost his entire existence?

I do not think so. For 60 years, since he climbed the Sierra Maestra and kidnapped some American marines, his leitmotif has been fighting Washington and trying to destroy the unjust capitalist system of production, convinced that the ills of Cuba derived from the private sector and the Yankees.

Then life proved otherwise: Cuba’s ills are the result of not enough capitalism, not too many Yankees, and of not enough democracy; deficiencies especially critical now with the death agonies of the generous Venezuelan cow, milked without pause or mercy in the midst of Real Socialism and of an orgy of corruption to which the masters of Havana are not alien.

A noted international development expert who prefers anonymity told me, “If Raul intends to overcome the economic and social crisis that afflicts Cuba, his timid reforms will accomplish nothing if he doesn’t open the political game and establish a regimen of freedoms, even though this would imply the eventual loss of state control.”

And then he concluded, “As long as there is a single party and as long as the large business enterprises are in the hands of a bureaucratic clique that makes the decisions, the country will continue to sink.”

His compatriots all know this well. And so they flee.

In the liberal corner we find Father Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek and the Austrians, Milton Friedman and the market, James Buchanan and the School of Public Choice, Douglas North and the institutionalists, individual responsibility, private enterprise, the Rule of Law, FTAA, free global trade, the Asian Tigers, the successful Chilean reform, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the small and efficient state.

This axis of confrontation is relatively new.

The 19^th century was about old-fashioned liberals against conservative, also old-fashioned. The 20^th saw, first, the battle between the supposed virtues of Hispanic identity against the defects of the Anglo-Saxons (José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel and the incendiary lectures of Manuel Ugarte). The 1910 Mexican Revolution simmered in the anti-imperialist sauce.

Following this was the appearance of Marxism and fascism, cousins who ended up looking very much alike. The Twenties were those of the Argentine psychiatrist José Ingenieros, with his soul and umbrellas both red, and those of José Carlos Mariátegui and his Seven Interpretive Essays on the Peruvian Reality.

Soon after, in Mussolini’s Italy, a young Argentinean soldier observed the fascist experience with admiration. His name was Juan Domingo Perón and on his return to Buenos Aires he launched his “Third Way.” Neither communism nor capitalism: Justicialism. That is, Peronism, pure and simple. It was the Creole expression of fascism.

The Cold War followed immediately on World War II. Before and after Latin American was filled with sword-bearers sanctified by Washington. The axis of confrontation then passed through the barracks against the communist, or everything that smelled of them.

In the Forties another force broke through: the democratic left. They began to triumph in Guatemala (Juan José Arévalo), Costa Rica (José Figueres), Cuba (Carlos Prío), Venezuela (Rómulo Betancourt) and Puerto Rico (Luis Muñoz Marín). They were democratic anti-communists who came from the left. They fought against militarism from anti-communist positions.

They also constituted a soft vegetarian variant of populism. They believed in the paternalistic welfare state and did not reject statist measures. Reigning in the economic field was his majesty Lord Maynard Keynes and politicians who were using the national budget and public spending to boost the economy. Wonderful. They were intellectually entitled to squander fortunes. Simultaneously, they distributed profits and executed land reforms that almost never achieved their objectives.

In 1959 the badge of the struggle changed again. Fidel and Raúl Castro, along with Che Guevara and with the innocent help of other democratic groups, overthrew the “soft” military dictatorship of Batista, with the objective of establishing a communist dictatorship copied from the Soviet model. They proposed, essentially, to destroy the governments of the democratic left, defining the adversary by its relations with the United States and with property.

If you were pro-American and pro-market, even if you were leftist and respected freedoms, you were the enemy. Cuba attacked Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, Panama, everything that moved and breathed. Also, of course, the old military dictators like Somoza, Trujillo and Stroessner, but not for being tyrants, but for being pro-American and pro-capitalist. The island was “a nest of machine guns in motion.” The United States joined the war in 1965; in the midst of a civil war Marines landed in the Dominican Republic in order, they said, “to avoid another Cuba.”

With Allende in 1970 the dangerous game of authoritarian democracy began and it ended three years later in a hail of bullets. Pinochet, who was Allende’s man, or so Mr. Allende believed, ended up bombing him. However, as the general didn’t know a single thing about economics, he handed off these mysterious activities to some young Chileans who had graduated from the University of Chicago and Harvard. Soon they began to turn the situation around.

It was the first time Latin America heard of Friedrich Hayek (Nobel Prize in 1974), or Milton Friedman (1976). In the mid-eighties it was clear that populism had plunged Latin America into a pool of corruption, unbridled inflation and unrestrained public spending. The region had failed. They spoke then of the “lost decade.”

Thus arose the first liberal cycle in Latin America. Its main protagonists came from another ideological quarry, but they were flexible and intelligent people. Among others, included the Bolivian Victor Paz Estenssoro, who returned to power in 1985 to fix the mess of 1952, the Costa Rican Oscar Arias, the Argentine Carlos Menem, Mexico’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the Colombian Cesar Gaviria and the Uruguayan Luis Alberto Lacalle.

More than liberal convictions propelled the certainty of populist failure. Unfortunately, accusations of corruption against Salinas and Menem, plus the excessive increase in public spending in Argentina, discredited that liberal reform and its enemies began to effectively attack “the long neo-liberal night.”

In 1999, finally, Hugo Chávez began to govern and he initiated another phase of authoritarian democracy. This has now come to its end, sunk in poverty, with shortages and corruption, giving way to the new cycle of liberal democracy, that perhaps started with the Mauricio Macri’s victory in Argentina. Let’s hope it lasts.

Then he wants to continue, and continue, and continue. It is very amusing to be president. He likes living in the Quemado Palace. He knows nothing of law, economics, history. He knows nothing about anything, except the infinite goodness of coca, a plant whose cultivation is increasingly widespread, to the sadness of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, the one who governs is his vice president, Álvaro García Linera, a Marxist professor, mathematician and sociologist with a hideous revolutionary past, who concerns himself with the official carpentry. Evo, meanwhile, shows off, plays football, avoids talking and greatly entertains himself.

There is something unhealthy about the need to rule that Evo exhibits. It is the living representation of the platonic idea of narcissism. He has twice amended the Constitution. If he wins the referendum he won’t have to update the text again. He will be able to be reelected indefinitely and will die in the royal bed, like the ancient monarchs.

Will he succeed? He should lose, but who knows. He has wildly increased public spending. When he came to power the government consumed 21.05% of GDP. Now it is 43.26%. It is the second highest per capita public spending in Latin America. The first is Ecuador (44.17%). Chile, the best governed nation in Latin America, dedicates 24.88% of GDP to this category.

That enormous public spending wouldn’t be so serious if the money belonging to everyone was handled honorably, but it isn’t. According to Transparency International’s Perception Corruption Index, Bolivia is a pigsty: its score is 35. In this cataloging, with anything under 50 the country is in very bad shape. Bolivia ranks 103 out of 175 countries, one of the worst in Latin America.

Bolivia is headed into a crisis. It will probably devalue its currency after the referendum. Like good populists, neither Evo Morales nor his vice president believe in economic freedom nor in the virtues of the market. They believe in Statism and cronyism, and have confiscated several key companies, subscribed to the fateful recipe of 21^st Century Socialism, and, in collaboration with the Cuban security services, have not ceased to imprison their adversaries, exile them, and, once in a while, assassinate them.

When they came to power, Bolivia received a reasonable ranking on the Index of Economic Freedom from the Heritage Foundation. It was classified as “moderately free.” Today it is in the lowest ranks, and its economy classified as “repressed.” This is an infallible recipe for disaster. It is enough to review the list to confirm that greater freedom and openness corresponds to a better level of development.

But, in my judgment, the greatest damage has been in the institutional terrain and in the intimate fabric of the Bolivian nation. The multinational State is a stab to the idea of a republic of citizens equal before the law, united by constitutional patriotism, as Simón Bolívar claimed and as Victor Pas Estenssor tried to carry out with the unifying revolution of 1952.

Evo Morales returned Bolivia to the pre-Colombian period, as if that hostile and fierce world of ethnic remnant that had frequently made war had been a kind of peaceful confederation of beatific people.

He did not understand that the very idea of the Republic of Bolivia was the product of a modernity embodied in the dreams of Bolívar and Sucre, and not in the fantasies of Tupac Katari, inevitably erased from history by the insensitive European steamroller, as happened throughout the New World with indigenous cultures.

On February 21 we will know if this calamity called Evo Morales has an expiration date, or if he came to power to remain indefinitely. Very soon now.

There are others. For example, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is awarded to thousands of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. A dozen nationalities benefit from this measure, conceived to protect certain people from the horrors of violence or natural disasters in their countries of origin.

But there are essential differences between TPS and the Cuban Adjustment Act. The temporary protection must be periodically renewed and depends on the will of a fickle Congress. The law that affects Cuban, on the other hand, leads to obtaining official residence after one year, and citizenship after five years.

Actually, it is a double stupidity that TPS does not lead to residency and eventual citizenship. The provisional nature and lack of progressive integration into U.S. society cruelly harms immigrants and turns the “American dream” into an unnecessary nightmare, tinged by the ominous persecution of “La Migra,” the immigration authorities.

The other piece of this nonsense is the self-inflicted damage to the United States. What is best for this country, and for everyone, is working citizens who comply with the laws, create wealth, pay taxes and become a part of the mix in the legendary American “melting pot,” as happens with the vast majority of Cubans.

Cuban exceptionalism began with the rules of the Cold War. It was a predictable American response when Castro and a small group of communists, convinced of the superiority of Marxist-Leninist ideas, the benefits of the USSR, and the perfidy of the United States and its market economy, decided to create a communist dictatorship on the island.

Moscow, which knew how to organize satellites, because they had done it cruelly and efficiently in Eastern Europe after the end of the Second World War, immediately offered its unconditional support. Without delay, Soviet advisors arrived discretely on the island with the primary objective of crushing the Cuban democratic opposition and creating counterintelligence networks. Their next step would be to fill the island with nuclear missiles.

Khrushchev said, “Now the United States will know what it means to live with a dagger pointed at its neck a few miles off its coast.” It was his retaliation in response to harassment from NATO.

The United States reacted. In mid-March 1960, President Eisenhower signed a secret order authorizing covert operations to liquidate the Russian satellite installed in Cuba.

It was too late. A week earlier the Spanish-Russian general Francisco Ciutat had arrived on the island. Fidel received him and called him “Angelito” – little angel. Soon there were 40,000 Soviet soldiers and advisors. The Cold War was at its peak in the Caribbean.

Thirty years later, the European satellites broke with the USSR and the Eastern Bloc disappeared, including the Soviet Union itself. The United States’ strategy of containment had worked. The U.S. had won the Cold War.

But not everything. In Cuba and North Korea they dug trenches. Fidel Castro, extremely angry at that “traitor” Gorbachev, proclaimed, as his brother Raul applauded, “I will sink the island into the sea before abandoning Marxism-Leninism,” assuring that Cuba would remain as a communist bulwark to light the day when the planet would recover the revolutionary lucidity.

Fidel, a die-hard Stalinist, with the backing of Lula da Silva in Brazil, was given the task of collecting the rubble of communism and building with it the Sao Paulo Forum, a kind on Third International with room for all the “anti-imperialist fighters,” from FARC’s narco-guerrillas to Islamic terrorists.

Until Hugo Chavez appeared on the horizon, haloed by ignorance and irresponsibility, and loaded with petrodollars. Fidel seduced and recruited him, first to exploit him, and later to fight against economic freedom and against Washington, to the glory of the world’s poor.

Together, de pipí cogido, as the Columbians say so gracefully, in an indomitable Havana-Caracas axis, they would triumph where the USSR had crumbled, an objective and strategy that no one has denied or dismissed. Felipe Perez Roque, then Cuba’s Foreign Minister, announced it in Caracas at the end of 2005. Hasta la victoria siempre, Comandantes.

From this spirit of the Cold War – all that some backward countries could deliver – arose the dreadful fantasy of “21^st Century Socialism” and the anti-U.S. circuit of ALBA, set against the FTAA promoted by the United States.

It is not true, then, as Obama assumes, that the Cold War is over. At least in Latin America Castro, Maduro, Ortega, Evo and to a lesser extent Correa are keeping it alive, with the lateral support of Dilma Rousseff and Kirchnerism, the latter happily removed from power by Mauricio Macro.

It is inconceivable that Washington ignores this unfortunate reality or continues to think that this is a “nuisance rather than a danger.” Burying one’s head in the sand has never been a smart way to confront problems.

Henry Ramos Allup, the new president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, has done well, starting his work without fear. Not only does he have reason behind him, but also the Constitution and two-thirds of the seats in parliament. According to a Datincorp survey, 81% of Venezuelans reject Nicolas Maduro’s call to ignore the decisions of the new parliament.

The clearest priority of this anguished society is to relieve its grave economic problems, but this rescue operation begins by respecting the popular will, expressed in the designation of 112 deputies, not one less, and in releasing to the streets the hundreds of unjustly imprisoned political prisoners, led by Leopold Lopez and Antonia Ledezma. Venezuela’s national poet, Andres Eloy Blanco, anticipated it many years ago: “I sowed the stars / held in the heart / and it was good like the day / the prisoners were freed.”

Former Spanish president Felipe Gonzalez warned Maduro with great urgency. Venezuela is heading into a humanitarian crisis. Bad governance has decimated the productive capacity of the country, there is not enough food, medicine nor the money to import them, and international credit is finished.

As Maduro continued to chat with the birds, indifferent to reality, and as his new minister of the economy can’t find his right hand and ended up pulverizing the rubble, the only hope for rectification is the set of measures that can be taken by the National Assembly.

Second, inflation takes off and the government responds with price controls and the printing of money, which worsens the crisis. The third stage is complete chaos: shortages, an exponential increase in poverty, and a virtual collapse of the system.

The fourth, which Venezuelans should be experiencing now if Maduro weren’t so blatantly ignorant, is the adjustment. Prices must be reconciled, public spending cut and the productive apparatus revitalized by opening the doors to entrepreneurs and national and foreign investors, which requires respect for private property and a trustworthy judicial system.

21^st Century Socialism arose with the petrodollars of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, under the treacherous direction of the Castros, and will end up with the collapse of this artificial, absurd and, above all, unaffordable, little world. Fortunately, as happened with the communist counties of Europe, the transition will probably be peaceful and carried out via legitimate elections. He who kills through ballot box, dies through the ballot box.

The other similar regime in the world, North Korea, is also a military dynasty and has continued for 68 years. The father of that orchestrated anthill of rhythmic gymnasts was Kim Il-Sung. He started in 1948 and died, in power, in 1994, but not before bequeathing to museums the chairs where he had placed his egregious buttocks. He was then followed by his son Kim Jong-il, and his grandson Kim Jong-un.

North Korean security troops exceed 106,000 members, to control 24 million survivors. More than twice the Cuban population. That police apparatus, which doesn’t do things by halves, has created a system of political castes called Songbun, dividing people into three groups: loyals, waverers, and hostiles. The loyals serve as auxiliaries to counterintelligence in the harassment and surveillance of the other two sectors. It is no wonder that when Fidel Castro visited North Korea, according to those who accompanied him, he was fascinated with the experiment. It seemed like a model country.

Has the Castro regime triumphed or failed? If measured by the ability to cling to power, it has undoubtedly triumphed. Raul Castro was the Minister of Defense at age 28, he is now 85 and has never ridden in anything but good official cars and never ceased to live lavishly with the royal family. For him and for his group of minions, it has been a success.

If measured by the influence achieved by the regime, the conclusion is the same. Venezuela has become a generous colony, meticulously exploited, and political operatives trained by Cuban intelligence services control or influence a dozen unfortunate Latin American countries, to the extent that the Colombian peace process is being irresponsibly negotiated in Havana.

But if what we take into account is the overall prosperity of the country and the degree of genuine happiness shared by the whole population, it has been a resounding failure. Across three generations Cubans have suffered thousands of executions, tens of thousand of political prisoners incarcerated, millions of people exiled, and the government has erected the most unproductive model of wealth creation in history, while meticulously demolishing the material structure it inherited. It is “the art of making ruins” at its finest.

In 57 years of absolute control of power, the Castros have aggravated to the point of martyrdom key elements of daily life: food and access to drinking water, housing, transportation, communications, electricity, shoes and clothing. From this grim landscape escape, as always, the thousands of Cubans currently stranded in Costa Rica, compassionately cared for by the government and people of that exemplary country.

These dire results are not, in reality, products of evil, but of ignorance, the ambition of power and the revolutionary arrogance emanating from Marxist certainties. They were willing to kill and do harm to remain in power and forced Cubans to live according to the utopia they lodged in their feverish brains. And so they have devastated the country.

What will happen in the future? Nothing substantial. As long as the Castros and their clique do not retire from public life, and as long as their system – today transformed into military state capitalism – remains standing, the country will continue to be condemned to the massive emigration of desperate Cubans and the most radical lack of productivity.

The basic problem lies in perceptions and in the confidence that emanates from them. It does not matter if the United States ends the embargo or substantially increases the number of tourists. It doesn’t matter if President Obama visits Cuba, like the last three popes, and gives a speech in favor of freedom.

Cubans, as a general rule, do not believe in the system. They do not believe in their compatriots. They do not believe in the destiny of their country. They do not believe in those who lead them, and much less in the capabilities of that sleepy and grim bureaucracy that imperturbably continues to practice centralized planning. All this will begin to change after the Castro regime is buried. Never before.

The blaze quickly spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. It seemed that there was, in the Arab world, a curdled desire to establish Western-style regimes, but that was not the case. What did exist, in reality, was the will to put an end to corrupt and incompetent military tyrannies that kept a substantial part of the population in poverty. To “the people” it didn’t matter if the substitutes were curacas from radical Islam, who imposed sharia and stuffed women into burkas to prevent the lewd exhibition of their faces.

What are the signs that allow us to speak about the emergence of a Latin American spring? There are at least three.

First, tentatively in October, Guatemalans elected Jimmy Morales – a television actor from the center-right with no political experience – over Sandra Torres, a woman from the left. Morales’s motto was simple and clear: “Neither corrupt nor a thief.” With this promise, he got twice the votes of Torres. Morales did not promise a revolution, but rather to return to republican roots, good management, honesty, and markets, and to combat poverty freeing the productive energy of the country.

In November it was the turn of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, another politician from the center-right. He did something that seemed impossible a few months earlier: defeating Peronism in its Kirchner variant, although his opponent, Daniel Scioli, was the most presentable face of that tendency, because, at bottom, he was oblivious to it. Macri also promised good government, tranquility, less populism, less cronyism, and, especially, to fight against corruption and drug trafficking.

The third symptom of the Latin American spring was the parliamentary elections of 6 December in Venezuela. The democratic opposition managed to gain a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, with which it can curb the totalitarian drift of Chavismo and begin to rebuild the country after 17 years of stupidity and abuses.

Voters punished Maduro for the atrocious shortages, the highest inflation in the world, the murderous violence that has turned the country into a slaughterhouse, the limitless corruption, and for the pathetic ignorance of a president who trills and can talk to the birds, but not to the people, because his little head is filled with “millions of penises” and uncontrollable fish, as if he were premiering a comical version of Tourette Syndrome.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/venezuelan-president-nicolas-maduro-freudian-slip-multiply-christ-multiplied-penises-article-1.1441650

The Latin American Spring is based on a rejection of corruption, as we have seen in the three countries mentioned, and as seen in Brazil and Chile. It can be seen in the conviction that populism, with its constant violations of the law, high public spending, welfare cronyism, constant demagoguery, and that obscene anti-market, anti-American and anti-Western language, all leading to economic disruption and catastrophe that invariably results in a painful adjustment.

Latin America is tired of the incendiary talk of the Sao Paulo Forum, of the devastating madness of 21^st Century Socialism, of the ALBA sect launched by Hugo Chavez and financed by Venezuelan petrodollars.

This Spring will carry away Bolivia’s Evo and his anti-Republican multinational invention, Correa’s Ecuadorian experiment, Sandanista Daniel Ortega’s “neo-Somoza-ism,” and will leave Cuba abandoned, more alone than ever, languishing in poverty, while the leaders who made possible this incredibly cruel way to mortify human beings are disappearing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales

The struggle for the respect for human rights is a fundamental milestone in the evolution of ideas. It means that there are certain rights that are not granted by the state but that are inherent in the nature of human beings.

Like many elements of our civilization, the struggle began in Athens, at the entry to the Stoa. That was when Zenon de Citia, 300 years before Christ, a Cypriot of Jewish or Phoenician origin, a  red-haired bow-legged doctor, as described by his contemporaries, preached that the rights of people did not proceed from the phratry – the brotherhood – to which they belonged or from the cities in which they had been born.

To paraphrase Martí, to be a man was much more than being Athenian or coming from an illustrious lineage. This idea of the Stoics, the philosophical current founded by Zeno, was picked up by Christianity and thus reached the present day. It is in the papers of the American Revolution and of the French. It is in the liberal revolutions of the nineteenth century.

Subsequently, the communists tried to refute this notion, which was tantamount to depriving us our right to a backbone. The argument put forth was that every right was positive and could be abolished or granted by the State, because the human being was nothing but an evolved infant.

Only the key to this evolution was, precisely, the increasing need that this infant has to freely make its own decisions. Without freedom the human being is a mutilated and sad infant. Without freedom, life is worth much less.

We do very well, in commemorating this celebration of human rights, to pay tribute to Ricardo Bofill and all the Cubans who accompanied him on the glorious adventure of changing the tragic sign of Cuban history.

Let us also dedicate this commemoration to Leopoldo Lopez and our Venezuelan brothers and sisters who today offer an unparalleled example of patriotism. Unfortunately, the struggle for human rights and freedom still consumes lives, but it is worth fighting this fight.

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14ymedio Editor’s Note: These words were spoken by the author at Miami Dade College on the eve of Human Rights Day.

There is a successful way of governing. It is the one used in the 25 leading nations of the planet, among which should be Argentina

Which ones? The usual suspects: Norway, England, Switzerland, Canada, Germany, United States, Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, and the usual etc. How do they do it? With a mixture of respect for law, clear rules, strong institutions, markets, open trade, reasonable administrative honesty, good education, innovation, competition, productivity and, above all, confidence.

Sometimes the governments are liberal, Christian democrat or social democrat. Sometimes they combine in coalitions. Despite disputes, they all form a part of the extended family of liberal democracies. What is usually discussed in elections is not the form in which society relates to the state, but the amount of the tax burden and the formula for distributing social spending. The economic model, on which productivity rests, is not in play in the voting booth, nor is the political model which organizes coexistence and guarantees freedoms. On this they agree.

They are nations, in short, that are calm, without upheavals, without saber rattling and rumors of chaos, wonderfully boring, where the voices against the system are too weak to be considered, and where you can make long term plans because it is very difficult for the currency to suddenly lose its value or for the government to hijack your savings in an infamous and illegal seizure.

That does not mean that there are no crises and speculative bubbles, or that some, like Greece, engage in underhanded practices and need to have their chestnuts pulled out of the fire. Of course this happens, but they overcome it, and the economy recovers without breaking the democratic game. There are inevitable cycles, which are produced in free markets, where every now and then greed distances buyers and sellers. The leading nations have learned how to overcome it and move forward.

Everyone hopes that Mauricio Macri will move in the same direction for the good of Argentinians, but given that it is the largest and best educated country in Latin America, one can venture that his victory will have notable consequences across the whole continent. For now, it is very important that Argentina has abandoned the drift towards Chavism introduced by Kirchnerism.

Macri’s victory will have repercussions in the Venezuelan elections, to which the democratic opposition will come with the certainty that it has a new and valuable friend who will refuse to validate the fraud being prepared by Maduro

Macri’s victory will have repercussions in the Venezuelan elections on 6 December, to which the democratic opposition will come with the certainty that it has a new and valuable friend who will refuse to validate the fraud being prepared by Maduro, much less the oppressive Civil-Military Junta he has threatened if the polls don’t go his way.

It will have effects on the Brazilian electoral landscape, strengthening the center right forces that oppose Lula; and on Chile, when Mrs. Bachelet, whose popularity is in the basement, calls new elections in which she cannot be a candidate.

Not only is Mauricio Macri, as rightly pointed out by Joaquín Martínez Solá in La Nación, the expression of the generational change this country needs—with men and women who didn’t suffer the trauma of the military dictatorship nor the guerrilla barbarity of the armed opposition—but he can be the one who will lead the fight in Latin American for democracy and freedoms. Someone who leads the country into the 21^st century, which began almost 16 years ago, and gets it out of the old populist morass in which Peronism mired it for many decades.

Few rulers have begun their mandate with so many national and international dreams resting on their management. It is a great country that deserves a great president.

Nor are they going to break the laws of the country they are heading to. In the United States a favorable law awaits them, enacted over 60 years ago in the midst of the Cold War. If they reach US territory they are granted a provisional parole and then allowed to regularize their status at the end of one year. They left Cuba legally and they will live legally in the United States. What sense does it make to stop them?

Not to mention that this measure that protects Cubans has a pedagogical utility. It serves to demonstrate that the best way to solve the problem of the undocumented is to arbitrate some formula that allows them to study, pay taxes, be productive and integrate themselves into the nation in which they are living. The notable success of Cubans in the United States is due, to a certain extent, to the fact that they can rebuild their lives quickly and fight to conquer the “American Dream.”

The same editorial, with anger and astonishment, reproaches the Cuban authorities who do not protect their own citizens. If 1,700 Costa Ricans, Uruguayans, Chileans, Spaniards, or people from any normal country in which the state is at the service of the people, found themselves in the situation these Cubans find themselves in, the government in question would have tried to protect them, the president would have publicly expressed his solidarity, and the foreign minister would have allocated resources to help them.

Cuba is different. The dictatorship has spent 56 years humiliating and mistreating every person inclined to emigrate. Anyone who leaves is an enemy. While civilized nations have institutions dedicated to supporting emigrants, without asking them their reasons for exercising their right to settle where they can and where they please, on this unhappy island the government plunders them, insults them and treats them as traitors.

So it has been since 1959, when at the airport adults were stripped of all the valuables they carried, including engagement rings, right up until today, when the Cuban government asks that of Nicaragua to use a heavy hand to stop the flow of Cubans. Nothing has changed.

The use of terror against emigrants reached a paroxysm in 1980, with the so-called “Mariel Boatlift”

The use of terror against emigrants reached a paroxysm in 1980, with the so-called “Mariel Boatlift,” named after the port from which they embarked. The political police organized thousands of “acts of repudiation” to punish those who desired to leave. They shouted insults and beat them. In a couple of cases, it rose to killing them. An English teacher died this way. His students, spurred on by the adults of the Communist Party, murdered him by kicking him in the head.

At that time I lived in Spain and gave work to a Cuban cameraman, originally from the Canary Islands, who survived these outrages. He had arrived in Madrid emotionally devastated. When he said he was leaving the country, his fellow workers hung a sign around his neck that said “I am a traitor,” threw him to the floor and made him walk on his knees between two rows of people who jeered and spat on him.

The Mariel Boatlift exodus (afterwards there were others) resulted in 130,000 new exiles, among whom there was a remarkable group of homosexuals forced to emigrate, many valuable artists (like the excellent writer Reinaldo Arenas), mixed in with crazy people, criminals and murderers taken from prison to contaminate the group and “prove” that only undesirable people did not want to live in the communist paradise. For this homophobic government a murderer and a homosexual were the same thing.

Apart from the human tragedy in the journey of those emigrants now protected by the Costa Ricans, what is happening in Central America makes us understand why this dictatorship, despite its attempt to show a reformist face, continues to believe that Cubans are slaves without rights or dignity. Pure escoria – scum – as they often call those who, despite everything, are willing to make any sacrifice not to live in that outrageous madhouse. Nothing substantial has changed.

Until 1998, according to the Castros, power came from the barrel of a gun and the Revolution was declared. This was the dogma. This is what they had done. At the end of that year, Hugo Chavez won some elections and came to power by other means, but with the same ends. Fidel, reluctantly, accepted the change in method, but clarified that power is never relinquished.

He accepted that Chavism dismantled in slow-motion the scaffolding of the liberal democracy and liquidated the trifles of the three powers and the freedom of press and association, but made it very clear that the Revolution, that is, Power, was never negotiable. Alternation was a ridiculous republican practice of the soft bourgeoisie. That option did not fit into a genuine testicular and revolutionary model.

What will Maduro do in the face of the electoral defeat predicted by the polls and his decision never to relinquish power, imposed by Cuba but enthusiastically taken up by him and the Chavista leadership?

Maduro has a Plan A and a Plan B.

Plan A is to try to win the elections or to accept losing by a minimum amount. How will he perpetrate it? Jailing or prohibiting the participation of opposition leaders who could drag their supporters to the polls. This is the case, among others, for Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado. Manipulating the voting machines. Generating false ballots. Drawing the districts to favor his voters. Abusing the media 100 to 1. Putting obstacles in front of the opposition vote in a thousand ways .

The intention of the government is to discourage the democrats so they do not vote. They calculate that with the total of all these tricks they can win, or lose by a small margin. And if they lose, they buy at any price a handful of dishonest deputies and continue with the power fiercely clenched between their legs.

And if Plan A fails? Plan B would be launched if the avalanche of votes is such that there is no way to hide a stunning defeat. That’s what happened to Jaruzelski in Poland in the summer of 1989. He used all the advantages of power to crush Solidarity in partial elections limited to the Senate, but Walesa and his democratic tribe obtained 95% of the vote and nearly all the seats. The communist regime collapsed before the evidence of widespread rejection.

Maduro has had the courtesy to announce his Plan B. If he loses he will use the prerogatives of the enabling law to demolish the few institutions of the Republic left standing. In that case, he will govern “revolutionarily” with “the people and the army” through a civilian-military junta. They call this infamy “deepening the Revolution.” Hand over power? Don’t even dream of it. He would create a satrapy pure and simple, collectivist and brutal, without bourgeois disguises.

What should Venezuelans do? What the Poles did. Come out to vote in massive numbers. Bury this filth under a mountain of votes, and fight ballot by ballot and polling place by polling place, without fear and without faltering.

Plan A is worse than Plan B. Plan A continues a dying farce that will inevitably lead to a slow and painful death. Plan B has the advantage of shamelessly undressing the totalitarian character of this dictatorship and puts an end to the doctored narrative of the revolution of the oppressed. End of story.

Many Venezuelans, Chavez supporters or not, military or civilian, will perhaps not remain impassive while Maduro and his masters in Havana distort the popular will and impose a permanent yoke. It will all play itself out on December 6. Perhaps life itself.

What is interesting is how the Castros’ dictatorship consequently diverts attention from the real heart of the matter – the persistence of a Stalinist dictatorship derived from the Soviet model eradicated in the West a quarter of a century ago – and creates a fabricated perception: a poor island besieged by the greatest power on earth. David against Goliath.

How does it do it? To understand this we have to know that this small island, unproductive and mistreated, impoverished and beggared, who pays no one because it wastes its resources, has an exterior outreach of great power learned from the KGB: some 12,000 people dedicated to the task of promoting the causes chosen by Fidel Castro and inherited and continued by his brother Raul.

What are those causes? Essentially, the denouncing of the United States and of evil and exploitive capitalism. Everyone who opposes this common enemy is welcome: Iran and the ayatollahs, Gaddafi’s Libya in the past, today Putin’s Russia, “21^st Century Socialism.” Everything. Anything.

Who are these 12,000 functionaries, the driving force of the Pharaonic diplomacy of Fidel, narcissistic, like so many, with the grandiose urgency to impose his will on the world?

First of all, the Directorate General of Intelligence, with its 1,500 officials, very well trained, scattered throughout the world. Every one of them seduces, recruits or manages a dozen local contacts. The members of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), another intelligence arm, present in every country and all international organizations. The 119 Cuban embassies, with 140 cities and 21 consulates general, all managed by State Security. The academic, literary or artistic institutions that have contacts abroad and travel and receive visitors. Whatever piece fits into the puzzles: a Silvio Rodriguez concert, a conference in Panama. Whatever.

Total: Thousands of people directly or indirectly linked to the political life and the communications of most of the nations of the world – and especially, those of the major Western countries – who are responding to the dictates of Havana.

I am not counting, of course, counterintelligence. That system, forged in the image of the East German Stasi, has in its ranks 0.5% of the population, some 60,000 people dedicated to the task of infiltrating and controlling “enemy groups
within the island, among whom are not only democrats asking for freedoms, but also Freemasons, Christian churches, suspicious collectives such as the LGBT, or the self-employed who are trying to run small home businesses to survive in the midst of so much repression and stupidity.

As soon as the message goes out about taking the annual resolution to the UN, this immense mechanism is set in motion to achieve the objective. There are always ties with the foreign ministries and the seats of government, even though formally they are enemies. Cuba looks after these personal relationships like gold dust.

Everything is used: From giving free medical treatment to the relative of a deputy, a general or a local police chief, to sending large sums of money to like-minded candidates for election, or cigars to heads of government, or getting a Don Juan to relieve the aching genitals of a Cuban spy of Puerto Rican origin, as happened to Ana Belen Montes.

This lady, condemned to 25 years in prison for spying, and whose pardon is now being considered by President Obama, reached a very high position in the Pentagon. Her official function was to gather all the analysis from different agencies and inform the White House about how dangerous the island was. But, in reality, she was secretly working for the benefit of Havana, revealing to the Castros the sources of American intelligence (which cost some lives) and telling the sweet story of a small and defenseless country that posed no threat to the security of the United States.

Washington, which has lost the reflexes it once had during the Cold War, does not know, cannot, or does not want to fight this enemy. Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, described how, shipwrecked in Lilliput, Captain Lemuel Gulliver is tied up and arrested by a legion of six-inch tall dwarfs. This is what is happening to the United States. It is not David against Goliath. It is Gulliver against 12,000 efficient dwarfs.

The phenomenon is very serious. The general perception is that the region is being governed terribly badly, which in part explains its longstanding relative backwardness. The social contract between the governors and the governed has been broken, and the latter refuse to give their consent to the former. The pitcher can only go to the well so many times before it breaks.

In the republican concept we are all equal, we are obliged to comply with the laws, we cannot write constitutions or dictate laws at the pleasure of an abusive clique, elections are organized as collective mechanisms to make decisions and not to legitimate corrupt mandarins.

Likewise, it is assumed that politicians and officials obtain their positions and move up and keep them based on their merits and not on their relationships. They are public servants who enter government to fulfill the mandate directed by the society that has elected them. They have been chose not to command, but to obey. This, at least, is the theory.

And the theory is not wrong. We Latin Americans have violated it until it has failed.

Bad businesspeople have violated it, in collusion with the rulers, sharing out profits and closing the path to economic actors who lack sponsors or who are unable to engage in bribery.

Union and syndicate leaders have made a mockery of it when they negotiate with power for privileges, knowing that they are making it almost impossible for young people to enter the labor market.

Certain religious leaders of all ranks have done great damage, as have verbose journalists and certain radical professors who condemn the quest for personal triumph, as if economic success in life – achievements through profits – were a crime or a sin.

The republican design works and we see it in the twenty most prosperous and free countries in the world

Of course the republican design is correct and it works. We see it in the twenty most prosperous and free countries in the world. Some are republics and others are parliamentary monarchies, but all accept the basic norms of the Rule of Law born from the enlightenment and perfection of liberal revolutions.

Among these successful nations, some governments are liberal and renounce the anti-clericalism of early times, while others are social democrats who stripped away the superstitions of Marxism, or Christian democrats devoid of religious fanaticism, or conservatives who abandoned an unpleasant taste for the iron fist or the disproportionate worship of order.

Sometimes coalitions form, at others the political terrain is adversarial, but they always proceed democratically in the exercise of power. They form a part of the same political family, presided over by tolerance, that arose from the American and French revolutions, although they are divided by an important factor, but one that is neither vital nor irreconcilable: the intensity and destination of the tax burden, which determines the size and responsibilities that each group assigns to the State.

Not included in this lineage are communists, fascists, and authoritarians of every stripe – militarists, ultranationalists, religious fanatics – because they do not believe in coexisting with and respecting differences, nor in the pluralism inherent in every society, nor in democratic changes in government, as evidenced by the endless trail of corpses they have left in their efforts to conserve power.

It is desirable that we Latin Americans learn once and for all a rather obvious lesson: the republican structure is very fragile and is only sustained over the long term if societies are capable of discriminating in favor of governments that accept and follow the rules that give meaning and form to this way of organizing coexistence. Govern well or everything will go up in smoke.

When they govern badly, first comes the widespread sense of collapse, and then come the strongmen, the military who command and control, the enlightened revolutionaries; they exert authority over our peoples, aggravating all the evils that they swore to fix. That is the terrible time of the strongmen.