Small Wars Journal

Venezuela Si! CUBAzuela NO!!

Sun, 12/16/2007 - 10:18am
In a "Small Wars" context but with very serious implications relating to the worldwide Cold War II now being waged between (a) America and the West on the one hand and (b) our new "Islamo-fascist" enemies and some of our "Socialist" enemies from Cold War I on the other, there was a close electoral victory for our side recently in Venezuela.

That South American country's egomaniacal, "Socialism or Death" dictator Hugo Chavez was narrowly defeated in the carefully contrived December 2, 2007 referendum which would have enabled him to follow in Fidel Castro's "President for Life" footsteps. So, a genuine "Hooray For Our Side!!" is very much in order.

But tempering this good news is the fact that this tyrant's current term in office extends all the way to 2012. And almost surely, this supposed "fool" and "buffoon" -- who is anything but funny in his impatient quest for dictatorial powers -- will be trying again in the near future to turn the Venezuelan Constitution on its head. Already, in fact, he has proclaimed: "For me, this is not a defeat. It is [merely] for now."

The next time around, the increasingly repressed, intimidated, brainwashed and "bought" people of that oldest of Latin American democracies may not have the fortitude and the election day turnout to repeat their recent pro-liberty, anti-Communist verdict of "Venezuela Si, CUBAzuela No."

And even if these good people do manage again to hold their ground at the ballot boxes and in the vote-counting, Horrible Hugo will for many years remain a deadly threat to US national security and a round-the-clock fomenter of instability throughout Central and South America.

Even if left to his grandiose pretenses of a so-called "Bolivarian Revolution," this would be a very serious matter. But the situation becomes far more deadly when we note that this oil-rich tyrant is now openly and aggressively allied with several "Death to America" regimes and terrorist-designated organizations in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Notice, please, that when he and Iran's apocalyptic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are together, they walk around literally holding hands!! In this state of mutual admiration, all of the raging religious differences between radical Islam and Chavez's avowed Christianity are set completely aside -- as long as their common pseudo-religious fervor is one of Hate Bush and of Death to America.

A de facto "CUBAzuelan Empire?"

In the US media, it is significant that even before this interfaith love affair developed in recent months, the highly influential Washington Post noticed storm clouds in Latin America. A January 27, 2007 editorial in the Post, which is normally oblivious to Leftist and "Progressive" threats to US national security, was boldly entitled "Venezuela's Satellites."

Correctly, it painted a highly worrisome picture of the rabid anti-Americanism which has spread in recent years from communist Cuba to at least three other neo-Stalinist regimes in South and Central America -- Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

With Fidel and Raul Castro's 50-year-old tyranny still serving as their ideological base but with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela now serving as the BIG OIL financier of this fascist-Left foursome, the Post's excellent editorial might well have been titled "CUBAzuela's Empire" -- comprised of the Cuban motherland and the copy-cat (and the newly renamed) client states of Hugo Chavez's Cubazuela, Daniel Ortega's Cubaragua and Evo Morales' Cubalivia.

Even in "peaceful" times this would be troubling news. But far worse during a life-and-death Global War on al Qaeda-style Terrorism is the fact that all of these regimes have brotherly relationships with the murderous likes of Iran, Syria, North Korea, al Qaeda, Hizballah and every other anti-Western entity on the planet. And add to this dark cloud the large weapons purchases and trade agreements now being made from and with both Russia and China, as well.

And recall, please, how very close Mexico came last year to electing still another self-declared "Socialist" government in the region -- and how much on that same slippery slope Argentina, Equador and Peru already seem to be. While none of the latter three are openly Castroite or Chavista, all are being pulled, cajoled and even "brainwashed" in that same statist, command-economy and anti-capitalist direction.

And what is that direction?

As "President For Life" Fidel Castro prepares to exit the scene after almost 50 long years of single-party tyranny, he leaves a 70-percent Black Cuban dystopia of egalitarian poverty and silent suffering -- except, of course, for his and half-brother Raul's communist nomenclatura (Party bigwigs) whose all-White, well-fed ruling junta is still the Soviet-style Politburo.

As Fidel's "People's Paradise" baton is passed to Comrade Chavez, Horrible Hugo's own "Socialism or Death" and "President for Life" and "Death to America" and "Bush is the Devil" rantings are setting the scene for his people to suffer exactly the same torments that a half century of Fidelismo has brought to Cuba -- where thousands of political prisoners have languished and died in what is at long last becoming known derisively as the "Gulag Guevara" it has always been in fact.

Eye-opener -- The Cuba-Chile Comparison

The extent of this socio-economic and civil liberties tragedy for the Cuban people since 1960 can best be understood by a detailed comparison between what has happened in Cuba and in Chile during these almost five decades.

From a roughly equal standing in most relevant factors (gross national product, personal income, housing, retirement security, property ownership, capital investment, human rights, manufacturing, agriculture, trade and commerce, etc.) a free-enterprise and quasi-welfare-state Chile has achieved three or four times the socio-economic standing of a "Socialism or Death" Cuba.

Those naí¯ve souls who excuse this half century of brutality and deprivation by citing Cuba's grassroots literacy program and broad-based (but largely rudimentary) health services should be forced to admit that two of Nazi Germany's major prewar energizers involved the lockstep efficient education of "Hitler Youth" and the physical fitness of the entire German population -- all the better to serve the anticipated "Thousand Year Reich," of course.

As Dr. Enrique Canton and Dr. Sergio de Paz of the Florida-based Commission of Studies for the Freedom of Cuba have observed: "... education and health are used in the island-prison as implacable instruments of ideological, mental and psychological control of the unfortunate citizens."

These same deadly comparisons would in due course apply to a socialist and increasingly communoid (communist-like) CUBAzuela, as well -- though the process of deterioration might be masked and delayed by that former democracy's enormous "nationalized" income from oil exports.

Steady Spread of the "Cubazuela" Label

Finally, there is an easy way to confirm both the accuracy and the street-corner viability of the newly coined "Cubazuela" label for this beleaguered Latino democracy -- which is even now being ruled almost entirely (and "legally" so, according to a unanimous vote of the lapdog Congress) by Presidential Edict, which is nothing but a euphemism for dictatorship.

Simply take time to Google-search the new label and observe how persuasively and how widely this frame of reference is already spreading in both English-language and Latino commentary.

In due course, the list of truthfully negative new labels and slogans by which the people of Central and South America can readily condemn their (and the late, great Latino nationalist Simon Bolivar's) clearly internationalist and largely "Bolchevista" enemies should include:

• Venerzuela Si! CUBAzuela NO!!

• Nicaragua Si! CUBAragua NO!!

• No a la Revolucion "Chavista-Bolchevista"

• En Cuba: Abajo El Gulag Guevara

• Viva Una Teologia de LIBERTAD

• Abajo El Fascismo de la Izquierda

• El Fascismo, El Comunismo -- Son Lo Mismo !!

• Socialismo O Muerte?? (Viva La Muerte !!)

• En CUBAragua: Abajo Las "Stalinistas"

• No Al "CommieCzar" Chavez

While such slogans and labels do not constitute a magic wand for destroying the enemy outright, each of them is a simple way to tell the truth about who these enemies of the people really are -- rather than the "voice of the people" and the "populists" they so deceitfully pretend to be.

Socialist Superstars -- both Left and Right

Finally, when Comrade Chavez and others of his ilk speak of "21st Century Socialism," he tries to put a human face on a demonic force which -- in the patently false names of "People Power" and "Progressive Movements" and "Wars of National Liberation" -- has been led for almost a century by such other Fascist-Left and fascist-Right SOCIALIST role models as:

V.I. Lenin (USSR)

Joseph Stalin (USSR)

Adolf Hitler (Germany)

Benito Mussolini (Italy)

Mao Tse-Tung (China)

Pol Pot (Cambodia)

Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam)

Kim Il-Sung (North Korea)

Kim Jung-Il (North Korea)

Idi Amin (Uganda)

Moammar Qadhafi (Libya)

Ayatollah Khomeini (Iran)

Fidel Castro (Cuba)

Hafez al-Assad (Syria)

Mingistu Haile Miriam (Ethiopia)

Nicolae Ceausescu (Hungary)

Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia)

Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe)

Hugo Chavez (Venezuela)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran)

Of course, the history of geopolitics boasts of still other thugs and tyrants: among them, Tito of Yugoslavia, Marcos of the Philippines, Ortega of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile, Nasser of Egypt, Peron and "The Generals" of Argentina, "The Colonels" of Greece, and Duvalier of Haiti. But these unsavory characters are really second-stringers, even bench-warmers, when compared to the real Superstars of World Socialism.

These "Superstars," as history is our tearful witness, have presided over the wholesale murder of perhaps as many as 250 million (250,000,000) of our fellow human beings -- to say nothing of the starvation, the torture, the political imprisonment, the death marches, the enslavement, the forcing into exile, and the daily repression (a.k.a. "social justice" and "people's democracy") they have showered upon literally hundreds of millions more.

And for those naí¯ve souls who persist in the fantasy that "Communist" and "Fascist" varieties of socialism are inherently different, let us end such nonsense with a quotation from none other than Adolf Hitler, reflective of the glory days of his infamous Friendship Pact with Joseph Stalin:

"The petit bourgeois social democrat and trade union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will... There is more that unites us than divides us from Bolshevism... above all the genuine revolutionary spirit."

The point is that Comrade Chavez is both a communist and a fascist. The bottom line is that the "Forces of Socialism" are themselves the dreaded Forces of Fascism, as well -- or as President Ronald Reagan once labeled them in their Soviet incarnations, "the Focus of Evil in the modern world."

Jim Guirard is a DC-area attorney, writer, lecturer and anti-Terrorism strategist -- and was longtime Chief of Staff to former US Senators Allen Ellender and Russell Long. His TrueSpeak Institute and TrueSpeak.org website are devoted to truth-in-language and truth-in-history in public discourse.