Castro and Maduro Enjoy May Day Together in Cuba
HAVANA TIMES (dpa) — Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flew into Cuba late Thursday and joined his counterpart Raul Castro early Friday to celebrate the traditional pro-government May Day parade in Havana.
Castro and Maduro observed the different groups of workers pass by from the rostrum overlooking Havana’s Revolution Square.
In Cuba, unlike most other countries, International Workers Day is a show of support for the government instead of a platform for labor demands.
The massive parade always includes a large number of foreign sympathizers including union representatives, this time over 2,000 from 70 countries, stated official sources. Among the attendees was the general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, José Luis Centella.
The event on International Workers Day began shortly after 7 a.m. Cuba time and was over before 8:30. Similar May Day parades were held in the different Cuban provinces.
“We celebrate this fiesta of the world proletariat in an international context preceded by intense campaigns of struggle,” said Ulises Guilarte, secretary general of the Cuban Workers Federation, the only labor organization permitted on the island.
Heading up the parade for the first time were the entire “Cuban Five” intelligence agents after the final three were recently released by the United States under the historic rapprochement between Washington and Havana.
Maduro, who traveled late Thursday to Havana to participate in the parade in Cuba, is due back in Venezuela to attend the May Day political rally this afternoon in Caracas.
John, you could not be more wrong. Your problem is that you make this stuff up in your head. You should talk to real Venezuelans. The reason the Bolivarian revolution will fail is because there is no there…there. The political infrastructure in Venezuela is bought and paid for. No true believers. Maduro will last only so long as he can continue to pay bribes. When he can no longer pay for the generals to protect him, he is outta’ there.
You can dream on that the “Bolivarian Revolution” is going to rebound. But it was a fraud from the very beginning.
Maduro and the gang of corrupt businessmen and military officers who form the Venezuelan ruling clique are busy sending their embezzled cash abroad to secret bank accounts in Panama, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands. When it all comes crashing down in a few months, and it will, Maduro will retire to his condo in Cuba.
He isn’t going to be around long enough for gas prices to rebound.
Once the price of crude returns to traditional levels and then increases as the ever-diminishing resource becomes more expensive to extract, Venezuela will have enough money- in its still very free-enterprise capitalist economy- to finance the social programs initiated by Chavez and continued through the world-wide recession and drop in the price of oil .
Both leaders are anti-imperialists, for socialist -style economics that share the wealth and that is a quite efficient base for a long and comradely relationship between the two countries.
The bad news for you counter-revolutionary, pro-imperialist, anti-democratic folks is that the world is changing and U.S. imperialism is going down along with any hopes you may retain that Cuba will ever become anything like the “Whorehouse of the USA” which was pre-revolutionary Cuba.
The world is becoming more democratic and you can no longer stop it.
But…… you sure can whine about it.
Do your research. The global recession of 2008 – 2013 had a minimal impact in Latin America and less so in Venezuela. México and Brazil saw huge increases in GDP during this period. Venezuela’s petroleum-based economy was well-insulated from the global recession as oil prices stayed high. Regrettably, Venezuela’s economic problems are home-grown.
Castro destroyed Cuba’s economy without the need of any Global recession.
Chavez and Maduro did the same in Venezuela. You are looking for excuses.
Blame the real culprits.
Of course Global recession had nothing to do with the US- or did it?
People who live in glass houses etc.
These two deserve each other! Maduro as President of the country possessing the largest known oil reserves in the world has managed to achieve the highest rate of inflation in the world, building upon the work of his predecessor Hugo Chavez who achieved annual inflation rates from 2008 – 2013 exceeding 24%. Under Maduro that rate now exceeds 50% ANNUALLY! Note that Raul is wearing his four rows of ribbons – for serving where? The so-called “five” spies are being paraded around and put on display at events all over Cuba either individually or together as in this instance. They have all been made “Heroes of the Republic” – quite an achievement for getting caught!