Shortly before I was born, the world permitted Hitler to not only come to power, but to make himself a dictator, and the world community did not start to act until it was too late. Even worse, they teamed up with the larger criminal, Stalin, and totally ignored his crimes. This ignoring is continuing to this day, and Putin’s Russia has never settled the scores with the past. People who have committed crimes against humanity are celebrated as heroes.
The evil of communism survived in Cuba. From there it infected Latin America, and took root in Venezuela. Communism is an ideology of dominance in which the leadership strives for absolute power. To get absolute power, the enemies—present and potential—have to be completely eliminated. The enemy to power is everyone with resources. Thus, everyone has to be poor, and be depending on the state for his survival. The landowners, the factory owners, the merchants, the farmers, the educated, the clerics, the organized labor, all of those have to be eliminated.
The communist ideology says that to create the communist ideal, one has to create a “new man,” and to do that, one has to eliminate about 10% of the population. It has been shown that only about 10% of a population is connected beyond their immediate family, neighbors, and co-workers. Those 10% are the only ones who can stage a rebellion. Those are the ones who have to be eliminated. Stalin executed and starved them to death. About ten millions of them. Castro executed some, confiscated the property of many more, and made conditions so bad that they fled to USA. The Cubans keep fleeing to USA. This summer has seen the largest wave of “balseros” (people fleeing in home-made rafts over the Caribbean Sea) since after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why now?
Castro’s Imperialism
When the help from the Soviet Union dried up, Castro tried to take control over the oil-rich South American nation of Venezuela. He had an infiltrator in the presidential palace, an army officer by the name of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (who died in Cuba around December 30, 2012, although the regime lied about his death date, and as of today they have still to produce a death certificate, or a medical report, which, together with an audio recording in which his assassination by this method is mentioned, suggests that he was murdered by Raúl Castro). Anyway, in 1989 the first attempt to take power was made, the “Caracazo”, but it failed. A plan to murder the president was averted late in that year, and Chávez was temporarily jailed, but was released by the president (General Peñaloza, then head of military intelligence, has related this to me). In 1992 they tried again, now with a military coup on February 4th, but it, too, failed, and Chávez went to jail. In November the same year a second military coup was attempted, with wanton killings, but also that failed and Chávez remained in jail.
The Venezuelan society was, however, deeply infiltrated, including a high-level person in the presidential palace (we know this because someone tricked president Carlos Andrés Perez to sign the promotion of Chávez after the averted assassination attempt in 1989). They managed to get Chávez released, and he was allowed to run for election to president in 1989. According to what Vice Admiral Carratu has told me (he was “jefe de la casa militar”, responsible for the president’s security, during the 1992 military coup attempt), the director of the election authority was murdered weeks before the 1989 election, and fraud was committed to give the victory to Chávez. And so Castro gained control over Venezuela.
Fast forward. After having successfully used the same method of gaining power in several other nations in Latin America, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez set their sights on Honduras. Then president Manuel Zelaya was host for the meeting in which Cuba was reinstated into OAS, from which it had been excluded after having attempted a military invasion of Venezuela in the early 1960’s. On June 28th, 2009, Zelaya tried to hold an illegal referendum, in open spite of a direct Supreme Court cease and desist order. He was arrested by the military acting on the Supreme Court’s orders. As a matter of national self-defense in the face of the presence of a large number of armed trouble-makers from Venezuela and Nicaragua inside the country, they judged it unsafe to hold the president inside the country, and so they expatriated him to Costa Rica (where he switched to pajama and falsely claimed that he had been expelled in pajama). The constitutional democracy of Honduras had thus saved itself, for now. It was the first country to successfully resist the Russio-Cuban method of infiltration (the second became Ukraine early this year, when the people threw out the pro-Russian president).
However, in Honduras as in Ukraine, the threat is not over as long as the enemy remains committed to try to conquer the country. I believe the best way to permanently bring Russia into line is to support the Siberian independence movement until victory, but that’s another fight. My concern in 2009 was with Honduras. Neither Honduras nor any country on the Western Hemisphere will be safe, until democracy has been restored on Cuba. “Attack is often the best defense,” as the proverb goes. They infiltrate and try to overthrow regimes from the inside. So how to defeat Castro?
Saving peace and democracy
Infiltrating Cuba is virtually impossible due to the complete physical isolation of the nation. They are even more isolated than North Korea, since they have no land borders. Furthermore, they have virtually no internet or other useful two-way communication.
The weak spot of Cuba is their economy. The extermination of all those who were carrying the economy means that there is virtually no economic activity on the island, so they live on tourism, some exports of raw material (nickel stands out), and—importantly—what they are robbing from oil-rich Venezuela, their de-facto colony since 1999.
Investigating the situation in Venezuela I found that there was fertile ground for a rebellion. Contrary to the western media image, the regime did not have the majority of the people behind it. It didn’t take much study to conclude that it was an electoral dictatorship, a “skenvalsdiktatur” in Swedish, a term that was amply used in the 1930’s in Europe, but that now needs to be dusted off for countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and maybe also Argentina. It’s a franchise, Cuba provides the intelligence through their spy agency G-2, and helps the presidents perpetuate themselves in power in return for them helping Cuba.
The country obviously needed a clandestine resistance movement. There had been much struggle but all open, as if it was a democracy. The dictatorship knew how to neutralize the democratic opposition: Leaders were either bought, compromised, or otherwise eliminated, and they effectively managed to divide the opposition. What they didn’t divide they infiltrated, and gave people the wrong ideas. The clandestine resistance would need to communicate the truth, to counter this propaganda and state-instigated rumors.
In February 2011, I contacted a handful of Venezuelans from different backgrounds with an idea to create an anonymous resistance network, and so “Operación Libertad Venezuela” was born. To this day it has managed to stay largely clandestine, even though since 2013 it has had two public spokespersons: Former director of the election authority CNE, Ana Mercedes Díaz, and María Conchita Alonso, whose fame in Latin America makes an introduction superfluous. “OLV” manages tens of Facebook-pages for sharing news about the struggle, something that the regime’s censorship does not allow in conventional media. Facebook was chosen strategically: Twitter has inadequate security (as proven by the fact that many tweeters have been arrested this year), and specific domains (such as used by blogs) are way to easy to block. They have tried but failed to block OLV on Facebook, and their only recourse has been to drastically slow down the Internet as a whole.
Unlike Twitter, Facebook also offered affordable advertisement, and using that feature OLV kick-started the resistance when the regime was hiding Chávez’s death in early January, 2013, with this post:
The collapse of the Venezuelan economy, the death of Chávez, and the tyranny of Maduro have all played into the hands of the resistance. The idea that communism is a viable ideology has been torpedoed by reality. The fact that there is a foreign invasion (not just Cuban militaries but also Russian, Belorussian, and Iranian, plus many Chinese workers in the main military base) is now clear to a majority of Venezuelans. The brutal repression of peaceful protests earlier in 2014 has convinced many that this regime is more akin to Kadaffi’s in Libya, or Assad’s in Syria, than to the dictatorships that fell relatively peacefully in Tunisia and Egypt. In other words, this regime will not let go of power voluntarily, they will fight to death to hold on to power. I, too, believe that to be the case, because they are guilty of so many and so severe crimes, that once out of power the only thing that awaits them is prison for life. We are talking crimes against humanity, cocaine smuggling on a huge scale, and support of terrorism.
This quisling-regime of Maduro’s will have to be removed from power by a popular rebellion, by force, the old-fashioned way. Non-violence does not work against people without conscience: Stalin, Hitler, Castro. Furthermore, Maduro is just a figurehead. The real ruler in Caracas is Diosdado Cabello, who has stolen in the order of a billion (with B) dollars—and so have several others of those white collar communists.
Although Russia has rebounded, the economical hardships in Cuba reveal that Venezuela still is important as an economical backer of the Castro dictatorship, because the economical disaster in Venezuela is directly influencing Cuba. The security forces that the regime uses to defend itself on Cuba, are the same ones that it uses to protect its hold on power in Venezuela. A simultaneous uprising in both countries will have the highest likelihood of success.
When the Venezuelan people do take action to defend their liberty and sovereignty, the world had better be ready to stand up for freedom and democracy. Back in 2009 the world falsely condemned the Honduran democracy’s self-defense as a military coup, ignoring the legal and political reality. That was a black stain on the world community, the memory of which will for ever live in shame. When that happened I felt like Hamlet, and I hated it, but a man has to do what a man has to do:
The time is out of joint, o cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.
I pray that the world will react before it is too late to avert world war three. Those who have perpetrated crimes against humanity in the name of communism have to stand trial, whether they are from Venezuela or Cuba, from Russia or China. The fight against evil never ends, and every generation has to keep up the guard and never allow itself to believe that the war is won. It’s not. It’s just an armistice.