OPINION: Dirty politicians and ALBA leaders
By Jolly Green
Part One
[1]
There have
always been dirty Venezuelan politicians, but when Cuba’s Castro
encouraged Hugo Chavez to take over Venezuela via a military coup in
1992, things got many times worse, many time dirtier. Dec. 13, 1994 —
Chavez visits Cuba, where he spent a long time and had long talks
with President Fidel Castro, and Chavez was honored with a ceremony
at the University of Havana. Although this is the first time Chavez
and Castro are known to have met on such terms, many historians
believe that Chavez was a Castro convert long before this. Because in
the Latin Americas and the Caribbean, there is not a left-wing
uprising, coup, attempted or otherwise, or even a revolution that
Fidel Castro did not have a hand in.
Chavez went to
prison for two years following his attempted 1992 coup, emerged from
prison in 1994 as a popular populist figure, and Fidel Castro honored
him. He enjoyed financial support from political groups that had been
left out of the traditional parties' power-sharing agreements. The
poor, the intellectuals, and the traditional left also supported him.
He ran for president in 1998 and was elected with 56 percent of the
vote. In the early months of his presidency, Chavez's support shot up
even further, reaching 80 percent according to the polls.
The problem
with communism is that it’s never what true socialists think it
should be. It’s always to do with one person, one man imposing
communism while he lives the dictator’s life of luxury and
affluence. That one man appointing others to do his dirty deeds while
rewarding them for doing so. Those subordinates of the top man are
willing to blindly follow him, even kill for him, while he rapes the
country of its riches. They are often stashing away the country’s
riches in offshore banks via trust funds and offshore companies.
There are multitudes of people only too willing to help the dictator,
often for as little as a nod of the head or a handshake, or a red
T-shirt. There are also multitudes of the poor and ignorant who
believe the dictator is all good, and all the bad things said about
him are untrue. The cashing and stashing process has been used in
Cuba and most certainly in Venezuela, multi-billions ending up in
offshore accounts while people starve.
Fidel Castro
died a wealthy man while even today; his people still suffer
shortages of food and are paid paltry sums for their labour. Castro
owned a palace on a private Cuban island, where no ordinary Cuban
would ever be allowed to venture. The island of Cayo Piedra consists
of not one island but two, a passing cyclone having split it in half.
Fidel had, however, rectified this by building a 700-foot-long bridge
between the two parts, with a 200-foot-long landing stage for his
yacht, the Aquarama II.
He owned his own money laundering bank in London. Havana International Bank LTD. Now renamed Havin Bank LTD. According to Forbes Castro was worth 900 million and owning 800 international companies.
See: http://www.therealcuba.com/?page_id=74
Castro owned a
stable of yachts and boats, which family members toured the world’s
most expensive resorts living billionaire lifestyles.
This yacht is the one his son Antonio sailed around the Mediterranean in with a bevy of beautiful women while ordinary Cubans starved.
See: http://www.therealcuba.com/?p=540
All
this under the pretense that he Fidel Castro was living the meager
life of something just above that of a pauper. Castro claimed to
earn 900 pesos a month, when in fact it was multi millions monthly.
Castro claimed he knew nothing about, and even despised, the
bourgeois concept of vacation. Nothing could have been further from
the truth; he spent two-thirds of his life vacationing in luxury,
drinking Champagne and eating Russian and Iranian Beluga and Sevruga
caviar.
https://nypost.com/2015/05/10/inside-fidel-castros-luxurious-life-on-his-secret-island-getaway/
“Ven Hugo,
esto es lo que puedes tener si te apoderas de Venezuela.”
Hugo Chavez did just that, brought up in a small house with dirt
floors; he now lived in a palace. He stashed obscene amounts of money
in Swiss and Lichtenstein bank accounts, multi-billions that one man
and his family could never spend in 500 years. He was making all
sorts of promises to the people about building low-cost houses for
everyone, free education for all, in fact, all the usual promises
that every one of these left-wing dictators makes to their people.
The low-cost houses promised were two million, actually built up
until 2019 were less than 200,000. Free education already existed in
Venezuela, the “for all” meant more unsuitable college students
were enrolled, students unsuitable for tertiary education in a normal
society, unaffordable for any society.
How did
Chavez’s family become billionaires as well? "Today, all the
Chavez family, even the extended family are tycoons; they are all
rich people who look like royalty. ... It's a kind of new oligarchy."
Have no doubt not one of them earned it honestly; they have huge
ranches and mansion houses that spread over whole blocks. It is most
certainly stolen wealth, and also in some cases derived from the
cocaine trade.
So where does
Socialism go wrong? It’s quite simple, called the human greed gene;
to one degree or another, we all have it, every one of us. All these
socialist type people start early in colleges with dreams of the
utopian socialist system, a dream which to live by. But when the
opportunity comes along to enrich themselves, every single one of
them is affected by the greedy gene. Just apply the saying ‘nothing
corrupts more than power.’ Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely.
It’s a
historical fact that great socialist and communist leaders are almost
always bad people, even when they exercise influence and not
authority; still, more when you superadd the tendency of the
certainty of corruption by their authority. One thing we can always
be sure of is that despotic power is always accompanied by corruption
of morality. Any authority that does not exist for Liberty is not
authority but force. Socialism easily accepts despotism.
Between 1999 to
2002, Hugo Chavez toured the world, visiting leaders like Castro,
Muammar Khadaffi and Saddam Hussein -- more than $21 billion left the
country. Foreign investment fell from $1.5 billion to $226 million in
the same period. The polls showed Chavez's popularity dropping, from
a high of 80 percent at the beginning of his term in 1999 to a low of
34 percent in December 2001.
At one of
Chavez’s most voiced declarations, "Oligarchs, tremble!” Not
just the upper but the middle class trembled. Some 150,000
middle-class Venezuelans, who feared a rerun of the Cuban Revolution
fled – shivering and trembling with fear to Costa Rica, Miami, and
Madrid. With the wealthy and these people went the country’s
wealth, between them and the foreign investors $21 billion just
disappeared from the economy between 1999 and 2002. Rich and poor
initially responded more to Chavez's rhetoric than to his policies,
perhaps for different reasons, but without doubt, he affected the
people, the rich left and the poor cheered him.
Unlike Cuba,
where the press and TV are all state-owned and state-controlled,
Chavez allowed a somewhat free, even though tightly controlled and
later shut down and took over the media world. He continually
criticized the press and belittled his opponents -- calling them
oligarchs and escuálidos, the squalid people -- no journalist was
ever thrown in jail at that time, that came later. Like many of the
socialist government leaders, he specialized in belittling and
bemoaning reporters, news editors, and media owners. They were rarely
able to operate under normal conditions. Laws were passed that
allowed Chavez to throw media people in jail if they criticized or
insulted him.
Chavez embarked
on an intense campaign to control the country's institutions, and
this campaign roiled the political establishment. Chavez had
succeeded not only in awakening the poor, who largely supported him
but also in enraging professionals of all sections of society.
Suddenly the middle class embraced what had seemed mundane activity
to them before -- movement politics -- setting off a grassroots
rebellion against the would-be modern Bolívar.
When Hugo
Chavez died most anti-communists breathed a sigh of relief, the world
was relieved of a wicked man who stole most of his country’s
wealth.
Jolly Green,
Bringing the
truth to a hemisphere of lying politicians
To Be Continued in Part two [2]
END
DISCLAMER: The opinion, belief and viewpoint expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinion, belief and viewpoint of iNews Cayman/ieyenews.com or official policies of iNews Cayman/ieyenews.com
Published June 3, 2019
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