Diplomacy: As Cuba’s Raul Castro ended his first Summit of the Americas amid smiles, Miami jokes and handshakes, a glance at his dictatorship shows a distinctive legacy: the spread of hunger, war and terrorism.
The first whiff of it was obvious enough on the perimeter of the Summit in Panama City.
It was in the noisy beating of pots and pans by Venezuelan dissidents, protesting food shortages engulfing their country. Called “cacerolazos,” they signify empty pots and pans in the kitchen, a shortage explicitly linked to Castroite state control in the country.
The Castro brothers have been in power for so long they know the original target of those protests — themselves. In 1973, when they were running Chile as Salvador Allende’s puppetmaster, Chile’s housewives across the country came out each night beating pots and pans to protest the food shortages of Castroite socialism.
Chile broke free of the horror by unleashing the power of the free market after the military took over, and there hasn’t seen a shortage since.
But the Castroite torch has been picked up in Venezuela, where the latest reports say the country is perilously close to running out of food. It’s Castroism again.
Things are so bad in Venezuela that its citizens are starting to pick up rifles. A nascent guerrilla movement is rapidly forming in the western region of Venezuela, according to Reuters. Such is the desperation that comes of Cuban control of all levers of power, as well as fraudulent elections to preserve a facade of democracy.
It also has been seen before — in spontaneous rebel movements that sprang up in Central America in the 1980s and in the military “Dirty War” that gripped nearly all of South America in the 1970s. Anyone attempting to fight back was smeared by the Castro propaganda machine as a human rights violator. But people fought back anyway, and some, such as Chile, really won.
There is also terrorism, which Cuba has spread through every country in the region in the past. Incredibly, it’s still going on as two large caches of smuggled weapons from rogue states in the Caribbean show.
With such a record, it’s no wonder that an InterAmerican Security Watch survey of well-informed likely voters saw low support for President Obama’s move to make friends with Cuba’s regime.
It’s a shame President Obama cannot place himself in that category. But it goes to show the importance of making the Castro record known.
Source: Investor’s Business Daily
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Quien realmente ganó en Panamá fue la hipocresía internacional: quedo demostrado que a Obama le importa un pito hablar de “derechos humanos” y al mismo tiempo tenderle la mano al régimen latinoamericano más corrupto en ese aspecto. La hipocresía también se ve reflejada en el silencio continental sobre Venezuela: mientras Maduro cada vez más demuestra su ignorancia para darle al mundo motivos para reirse, no hubo un sólo pronunciamiento de mandatarios sobre la crisis actual en Caracas. Que un payaso sentado como presidente por un monton de ignorantes sea el personaje más importante de los medios mientras su país se debate en violencia, escasez, es muestra de la hipocresía en el manejo de los medios y los gobiernos de los Estados. La muestra, en resumen, d eque una “latinoamerica unida” como dijo Rubén Blades, no pasa de ser un simple tema musical.