Carlos Alberto Montaner: Cubans in Venezuela Latin American Herald Tribune October 21, 2018
Latin American genius Carlos Alberto Montaner on Orlando Avendano's new book and how the small backward island of Cuba came to control Venezuela.
Luis Almagro affirms that 22,000 Cubans infiltrated Venezuela. Almagro is the Secretary General of the OAS. He has good sources of information. There is no doubt that the intelligence services and other military branches of Cuba completely control Venezuela.
Nicolás Maduro is just a puppet managed by Havana. That is why Fidel and Raúl Castro chose him. His weakness is his greatest appeal. He has no military training, and the Venezuelan communists think he is an improvised militant. He learned everything he knows about Marxism in a course hurriedly taught in the School of Communist Party Cadres “Ñico López” in Cuba. His esoteric idiocies – he talked to the birds, he saw the image of Chávez on the walls – totally discredited him. However, that is convenient for his masters.
Venezuela’s subordination to Cuba is an act against nature. Venezuela is more than eight times the size of the island. It has three times more inhabitants than Cuba. In its 40 years of democracy, which began approximately one year before the Cuban Revolution, the country developed in every aspect, reaching an economic, social and cultural stage much greater than that of the metropolis that today firmly holds it by the crotch and absorbs a good part of its riches.
In that period, Venezuela created about fifty universities and the Venezuelan intelligentsia went to train in the world’s great cultural centers. The result was that around the year 2000, Venezuela, despite all the mistakes made by its rulers, and despite the widespread corruption that existed, was the preeminent nation in Latin America. It was also a net recipient of immigrants, seduced by the clear opportunities to prosper that the country offered to the influx of foreigners.
It is not the first time that a small, poor and culturally inferior country manages to dominate another infinitely superior one. There are other cases, but the example of Mongolia in the thirteenth century is eloquent. Genghis Khan created an empire, the largest in history, which ran from the Korean peninsula in Asia to the Danube in Europe, including China. How did he do it? He knew how to make war. Their archers shot accurately from their small, but strong horses, that at night were bled by the warriors to feed themselves during the long cavalcades.
Genghis Khan was determined to succeed. He generously rewarded those who submitted to him and was implacable with those who resisted. He used the ancient method of stick and carrots. It’s what all empires have done. He had a primitive and clumsy method of government, but it was not a disorderly horde. Simultaneously, he and his captains impregnated every fertile woman they found attractive. Today there are millions of Europeans endowed with Mongolian genes who do not even know about their ferocious ancestors.
Orlando Avendaño, a young Venezuelan journalist and collaborator of PanAm Post, has written a magnificent book about Venezuela’s submission to Cuba. Its title, Days of Submission, is immediately explained in the subtitle: How the Venezuelan democratic system lost the battle against Fidel.
The book opens with a paradoxical phrase of the French writer Michel Houellebecq as an epigraph. The novelist says: “The summit of human happiness lies in the most absolute submission”.
In its controversial anticipatory fiction, entitled Submission, in the elections of 2022 the French elect as rulers an Islamist party and an Islamist president, knowing that they will impose the implacable Sharia as a national law.
Is there a masochist component of a substantial part of Venezuelans in the relations with Castro’s power? I don’t think so. They submit because of fear. Those who leave the country think that everything is lost, and it is preferable to flee than to resist. The military, like everyone else, are aware that 85% of Venezuelans would like that nightmare to end, but they fear Cuban intelligence, secretly present in all the barracks, where rifles and ammunition are separated to avoid any potential conspiracy.
The Havana regime does not know how to create wealth, but it is an expert in maintaining power. It learned it from the KGB and the Stasi. Even the paradox of the “unhappy collaborator” occurs. He is the anguished insignificant person convinced that what he does is terribly harmful, but insists on it because it is part of the structure of terror (he feels terror and also generates it) and suffers something more powerful than the urgent internal moral judgment: the “esprit de corps”. That feeling of belonging that binds human beings and allows them to become beasts.
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