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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Cuba after Hugo Chávez

Posted on Monday, 05.14.12

Cuba after Hugo Chávez
BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
www.elblogdemontaner.com

The most complex part of the inheritance left by Hugo Chávez are the
relations between Venezuela and Cuba. The existing ones were built on
the strange emotional, political and ideological subordination of the
Bolivarian leader to Fidel Castro and do not respond to the interests or
preferences of the Venezuelans.

In survey after survey, more than 82 percent of Venezuelans (meaning
that many of them are pro-Chávez) responded that they don't want the
installation of a political model based on Cuba. Presumably, a similar
percentage does not agree that Venezuela should continue to subsidize,
with billions of dollars, the pig-headed and unproductive collectivism
imposed by the Castro brothers.

Why did Chávez turn Venezuela into Cuba's deep-pocketed financier? The
reasons are several, but the most important one is that the lieutenant
colonel found in Fidel Castro a sort of spiritual and political guide
who advised him what to do and how and when he should do it. Fidel was
his guru, his moral father, his protector against the dangers that
threatened him in Venezuela and almost took his power and life in April
2002.

In addition, Fidel endowed him with a vision compatible with Marxism and
an epic internationalist mission that would forever consign Chávez to
history: to defeat the United States and bury capitalism. Between
Fidel's wisdom, enriched by three decades of training under the Holy
Soviet Mother, and Chávez's impetuous youth, aided by his bountiful
river of petrodollars, the two would triumph in the task of saving the
world, traitorously abandoned by the USSR.

How much was that ideological, strategic, police-backed protectorate, so
different from the untrustworthy universe of his own corrupt
collaborators, worth to Chávez? It was worth whatever Fidel needed and
asked for. Chávez delivered himself completely to the comandante, his
only source of security.

There was a point where both leaders, united in the same delirium,
planned to federate both countries and even created a joint commission
of jurists who began to study how to carry out that process. On the way,
Chávez increasingly placed himself under the authority of the very
skilled Cuban intelligence service, an organization that fed him
information about his military brass, his ministers and close collaborators.

Today, nobody around Chávez dares to speak, out of fear of Havana's
microphones. True, the opposition is controlled or watched by "the
Cubans," but the siege and humiliating harassment of the Chavistas is
much more intense.

When Chávez exits the stage, whoever replaces him in Miraflores Palace,
even if pro-Chávez, should question the sense of prolonging that sick
relationship, built on the emotional allegiance of a codependent leader
who no longer exists and worried most about controlling and spying on
his own ruling class. Why fear a poverty-stricken island that lives from
the handouts of a colony that's infinitely richer, more powerful and
sophisticated?

Venezuelan political scientist Aníbal Romero usually says that Castro's
internationalist efforts have always ended in failure. Castro-sponsored
guerrillas, sometimes led by the Cubans themselves, were defeated
throughout Latin America in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. They barely
succeeded in Nicaragua, paradoxically aided by the governments of
Venezuela and Costa Rica, but only to lose power one decade later in
democratic elections.

Peru's Velasco Alvarado, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Chile's Salvador
Allende, rulers aligned with Havana, were evicted from power, something
Cuba could do nothing to prevent. Angola and Ethiopia today have regimes
that are nothing like the communist models that were originally imposed
at the cost of Cuban blood. Who says that Castro's influence will be
preserved in Venezuela after Chávez's death? What for?

Cuba specializes in losing. That has been its history.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/14/2799314/cuba-after-hugo-chavez.html

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