Three Lessons for the Cuban Opposition from the Venezuelan Struggle

Julio Borges y Carlos Vecchio, representatives of Guaidó in Washington, meet with Mike Pence. (VP)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Jorge Hernández Fonseca, Lisbon, 8 March 2019 — The struggle of the Venezuelan people to liberate themselves from the Castro-Communist yoke is on the definitive path to victory. The sequence of events that have led to today contain lessons important for the struggle of the Cuban people, for the fundamental reason that the Castro regime provides the main political advisers of the Venezuelan dictatorship and the ones who direct it.

Three important lessons – among others – can be extracted as experience for the Cuban political opposition absorbed in a similar struggle to that of the Venezuelan people for their freedom.

A first lesson is related to the weight that international support has had in this struggle, recognizing, supporting, and encouraging democratic Venezuelans in their effort, above all, the almost total and unconditional support that the United States has offered. For the struggle of the Venezuelan people this is very important, because Cuban opposition sectors insist in keeping their distance from US support, to avoid the inevitable and hackneyed Communist propaganda. Being supported by the US does not mean being their puppet.

The second lesson that we Cubans must learn is the importance of the exile in the struggle for freedom. We know that the Castroite dictatorship has always sown the seed of division between “Cubans inside and Cubans outside,” a seed that has been absorbed to a certain extent by opposition sectors from within the Island. If, in the case of Chavista Venezuela there is a monolithic external support, it is in large measure the result of the work of the Cuban exile.

There is a third lesson that applies to the Cuban case, increasingly clear in the Venezuelan case. Despite the fact that all of Latin America insists on ruling out an external military solution, we Cubans know that Maduro will not hand over power if he is not forced to do so. When he was alive Fidel Castro coined a phrase that is also valid in Venezuela: “What we obtained by force, they will have to take away from us by force.” In Venezuela it’s a matter of the force being that of the Venezuelan army itself, but if that is not possible, then an outside force.

Additionally, the support for the democratic Venezuelan people to the current struggle is owed in large part to the work of American members of Congress of Cuban origin, like Marco Rubio and Miguel Díaz Balart, among other Cuban American officials, who have contributed decision-making support to the United States presidency, instructing it to take decisive actions in favor of the democracy and freedom of an oppressed and needy Venezuela, even humanitarian aid. The Venezuelan fighters inside the country feel heartfelt thanks for their Latin American brothers and sisters in key positions within the American administration, without feeling self-conscious about that support, selfless and in solidarity, as it is from fellow Latinos.

In Cuba there has been enough division over these three matters, now put on the discussion table and highlighted in the struggle of the Venezuelan people. The dictatorship of Maduro, like the Castro dictatorship, insists on placing the conflicting dichotomy between Chavismo and the US, copying the Castro regime’s outline, which repeats that the Cuban dilemma is not between the oppressed people of the Island and the oppressive dictatorship, but rather between “the Revolution and the US.” No one from the opposition within Venezuela rejects international support and much less do they reject the collaboration of the United States against Maduro. We Cubans must learn that lesson.

Translated by Sheilagh Carey

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