Maduro and the Future of Venezuela

By Frank Simon

HAVANA TIMES — Loud-mouthed, emboldened, always furious, Maduro fills TV and radio channels with his old-school authoritarian breath, with this method of selling a cat off as a hare and brings more of the same to this world that is already full of disasters.

Nicolas, a product the Cuban Communist Party’s Nico Lopez School for leaders in Havana, is unaware of every president’s maxim: to be a political intellectual. According to him, Venezuela is the sole of a shoe or the wheel of his bus which he yanks this way and that, turning the country into an instrument and the official United Socialist Party into a corrupt set up of a continental hegemonic platform.

The Saudi Arabia of Venezuela, which has millions in lots of respects, is suffering a special period that is almost worse than the one the Cubans suffered in 1992, with a fragmented society politically-speaking and a youth who emigrate when they see their futures in tatters.

Even so, the Party’s Granma newspaper has declared (like it normally does) that there isn’t a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and that all civil rights are respected there. The libel needs to speak of the equality between Cuban claustrophobia (where everything is totalitarian) and Venezuelan armor (where there isn’t any way of moving politics along a democratic course).

The dissolution of the National Assembly was a milestone in the path towards submissiveness, with bombs being thrown, blows, bullets and Chavista mobs included. If on May 1st Maduro announced the creation of his substitute Constituent Assembly, maybe on the same day this year, he will announce the creation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Paramilitary forces, media manipulation, blackmail and fraud will all mark the next polls (I won’t say elections), where a disgraceful line up of the softest opposition will be presented.

The Venezuelan people have been left outside this game of dominoes, they have no choice, the game has been shut off after this. More executive measures will come, private property will probably be seized, the right to dissent will be dissolved and it will probably mean the end of independent media.

The “homeland” reasoning will be used against the new class of outcasts, who they call the “scrawny” and who Fidel Castro called “worms”. The dehumanization of the ideological opponent will catch up with them and a stronger State will appear in front of them, still unsuccessful in its governance. In other words, Cuba.

Kissinger’s old nightmare has come to life in Venezuela, a nightmare which came up with the Machiavellian Che Guevara in his “Uno, dos, tres Viet Nam”, now the guerrillero is focusing on stolen ballot boxes and the legislative seats filled with sheep.

Those who hail state wage labor are the ruling class, which won’t ever leave because they want to or because of international pressure, until they have literally bled the country dry. Venezuela and Cuba appear to be two relatives who suffer from the same illness and when they run into each other, they begin to ask one another: “How about you, have you already started feeling X?”

A Cuban-style national assembly with 600 seals, all the same color who shout out in euphoria, would make Maduro very happy. And this plan is already in the works. First, give the executive power legitimacy, then nullify the legislative power as the justice and electoral powers die in blackmail’s back room.

Is this a country? Is this institutionalism? Two more “revolutions” like the Venezuelan one and Latin America will go back to having the quality of life of many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. We are watching the death of the Homeland, in the name of the Homeland, and in the name of economic and social life, the guillotine is ready for whole generations. There isn’t a future for those countries where Cuban-branded authoritarian socialism takes root.

Venezuela has prostituted its political future and will have to accept the Cuban people’s same martyrdom, whether it wants to or not. And in the case of Cuba it has meant nearly sixty years of an unfair struggle.

You can see Maduro and Chavez’s cult of personality in Venezuela, the creation of feudal serfdom where you either think like me or you don’t eat or live. The National Assembly will become part of the gallery of scenographies which were used as a backdrop for the Huns. Opposition politician Henry Ramos Allup’s advice to the government is useless: “go to the opposition, think, and come back and put yourself forward for nomination legally for another term.” 

No, totalitarianism is the sworn enemy of open semantics, so words like door, window, development, evolution, transition, progress, etc. fall on deaf ears.

You have to read philosopher Hannah Arendt’s book about this subject (“The Origins of Totalitarianism”) where she says that mediocrity and bureaucracy take control of political reasoning, thereby wiping out basic human judgement.

As a result, completely mediocre or nothing figures, such as Maduro, are able to make the most terrifying plays so as to maintain bureaucratic inertia. Excuses such as “I do my job well, unrestrained”, are given every day as an official pretext to wipe out the Venezuelan opposition. This was exactly how Fidel Castro thought and acted in the ‘60s, when he declared the wide political spectrum of forces illegal with the drop of a hat, forces which had been united in one way or another in the fight against dictator Fulgencio Batista.

An admirer of Mussolini, of “The Price” by Machiavelli and texts by Alejandro Magno and Hannibal; the Ayatola Castro left a strong legacy of political madness behind to excessive Nicolas Maduro. As dumb as a dictator can get. Cuban and Venezuela share the same martyrdom, illness, the cure for which is already taking too long.