Havana’s interference in Venezuelan elections
Cubans were present on the ground in Venezuela before election day, and at least four unscheduled flights took off from Havana and arrived in Caracas on July 30,2024 reported Diario Las Américas, citing a source from the island.
“I cannot confirm whether they were carrying passengers or not, nor what they were carrying and what the purpose of these flights would be,” the source explained at the time.
The first plane, the Conviasa A340 executive plane, which President Miguel Díaz-Canel normally flies on, left Havana and landed in Caracas on the morning of Tuesday the 30th. The second, rented from Turkish Airline, also left the Cuban capital for Caracas, where it arrived at midday. The third aircraft, from Cubana de Aviación, left Havana after one in the afternoon.
According to the source, at the time of sharing this information, a fourth aircraft would have been preparing to leave Cuba for Venezuela.
In an interview published on August 17,2024, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado acknowledged Cuba’s ongoing involvement in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
“National and international human rights organizations have issued severe objections…Several Venezuelan opposition victims have recounted atrocities [by Cuban captors]. We have long known that Cuba has had a negative impact in a variety of areas, including repression, persecution, espionage, and torture. And we have witnessed some callous acts in recent days.”
The Castro regime spent four decades attempting to overthrow Venezuela’s democracy before finally succeeding in 1999 when Hugo Chavez took power, and consolidated their control under his successor Nicolas Maduro in 2013.
Over the past 25 years Havana has bled Venezuela dry of its natural resources, and sustained the Cuban economy.
Effort to engage with Cuba on Venezuela failed
Secretary of State John Kerry said on August 20, 2015 that “the United States and Cuba are talking about ways to solve the Venezuelan crisis.” The Venezuelan dictator remained in power, and the crisis deepened. In September 2020 Secretary Kerry said, “It’s fair to say that everybody shares a little bit of disappointment about the direction that the government in Cuba chose to go” after the normalization of U.S.-Cuba ties, Kerry told me. He added that, “Cuba seemed to harden down after the initial steps were taken.”
Now new voices are advocating the same failed approach. Asking the Cuban dictatorship to help Venezuela is like asking Jack the Ripper to help end knife violence in London. Havana is an obstacle to Venezuelan liberty.
The Cuban Ambassador that manages Venezuela’s president
The claim that Venezuela is a Cuban colony, and Mr. Maduro is Havana’s viceroy is exposed by his own words.
On January 20, 2020 Nicolas Maduro at the XX Meeting of the Intergovernmental Commission of the Cuba-Venezuela Integral Cooperation Agreement reaffirmed the colonial status of his government stating, “I’ve told our older brother and protector, Raúl Castro Ruz, and he agrees. And it has been discussed in this mixed commission and we agree. The ambassadors are practically part of the Council of Ministers, the ambassador of Cuba has open doors in each ministry to coordinate, to move forward.”
Raul Castro and Nicolas Maduro at the CELAC Summit
This mentality did not begin with Mr. Maduro. In 2007 Hugo Chávez declared that Cuba and Venezuela were a single nation. “Deep down,” he said, “we are one single government.” Commander Ramiro Valdes with President Hugo Chavez
Attorney, human rights defender, and executive director of the Casla Institute,Tamara Suju, over Twitter revealed that Maduro was still dissembling on the extent of the Cuban Ambassador’s existing role in Venezuela:
“The ambassador of the Cuban dictatorship is already an integral part of the Operational Strategic Command of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (CEOFAN) and makes decisions. No one from the island enters or leaves without him knowing. All missions and Cuban militia report to him. Dagoberto Rodríguez is the ‘Boss’,
Below is the video of Nicolas Maduro (in Spanish) from Monday, January 20, 2020.
Top journalist says Maduro is an instrument of the Cuban dictatorship
Bertrand de la Grange, a two-decade reporter for Le Monde in America, and one of the world’s top Latin America experts, in a one hour interview published by The Objective on August 25, 2024 gave his analysis of the role played by Havana in the Venezuelan crisis. Here is a rough English translation of an excerpt of the full transcript available in Spanish.
Now, Latin America is once again, or not necessarily once again, but it is still experiencing upheavals that have been displaced in a certain way, particularly in Venezuela, which was a country that had been fairly peaceful despite Fidel Castro’s various attempts to send guerrillas of all kinds with Cubans, with Venezuelans and with other guerrillas and that had always failed. Now Venezuela is experiencing a very, very complex moment, and I would say that I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic, because it is very difficult to know what is going to happen.
We know what Maduro wants, but he does not represent anything, because Maduro is an instrument of Cuba, an instrument of Havana and has no capacity to make his own decisions. And I am fascinated to see that everyone is talking about Venezuela, about the actors within Venezuela, but very little about the main actor that is not seen, which is Cuba.
Cuba tries not to make too many statements, even in its own press it gives little space to what is happening in Venezuela, for a very simple reason: it does not want to attract attention and to start a real debate about the importance of Cuba in the search for a solution or, in reality, about Cuba’s participation in the problem.
Cuba has made Venezuela a colony, it is exploiting it, it is using its oil for its own needs. It is the very exceptional phenomenon, let us say, of a small island that has taken over the world’s leading oil power. Because we must not forget that Venezuela is the country with the largest oil reserves in the world, even though it has lower quality oil than that found in the Persian Gulf countries.
That said, for the moment, the debate is limited to within the Venezuelan political class. Or rather, I would say the political class, which is the opposition, and the mafia that is in power, because we must not confuse: those in power are not ordinary politicians, they are really a gang that has been consolidated since the death of Hugo Chavez.
We can say many things about Chavez, but it was an attempt at a nationalist revolution supposedly controlled from Cuba, because that is what it is from the beginning, Venezuela is controlled by Cuba. Chavez’s heir is an heir chosen by Havana. It is the Cuban Communist Party itself that chose him. We must not forget that Maduro was trained in the School of Cadres of the Communist Party of Cuba, he had training there, he is a person who is not very bright, as everyone knows.
The path to freedom in Venezuela
Gene Sharp, the late strategic nonviolence scholar, explained why strategic nonviolent resistance is the path to freedom in his 1993 work, FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY: A conceptual framework for liberation, published on the website of the Cuban NGO Brothers to the Rescue.
“Elections are not available under dictatorships as an instrument of significant political change. Some dictatorial regimes, such as those of the former Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc, went through the motions in order to appear democratic. Those elections, however, were merely rigidly controlled plebiscites to get public endorsement of candidates already hand picked by the dictators. Dictators under pressure may at times agree to new elections, but then rig them to place civilian puppets in government offices. If opposition candidates have been allowed to run and were actually elected, as occurred in Burma in 1990 and Nigeria in 1993, results may simply be ignored and the “victors” subjected to intimidation, arrest, or even execution. Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.”
Elections are not an instrument of political change in dictatorships, but they can be used as a tool of political mobilization in a nonviolent struggle, and this is what appears to be taking place in Venezuela now. Sharp offers a hard truth, but one that reveals that the power to change resides, not in foreign powers, but in the people themselves. An important excerpt is reproduced below.
Facing the hard truth
The conclusion is a hard one. When one wants to bring down a dictatorship most effectively and with the least cost then one has four immediate tasks:
- One must strengthen the oppressed population themselves in their determination, self-confidence, and resistance skills;
- One must strengthen the independent social groups and institutions of the oppressed people;
- One must create a powerful internal resistance force; and
- One must develop a wise grand strategic plan for liberation and implement it skillfully.
A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group. As Charles Stewart Parnell called out during the Irish rent strike campaign in 1879 and 1880:
It is no use relying on the Government . . . . You must only rely upon your own determination . . . . [H]elp yourselves by standing together . . . strengthen those amongst yourselves who are weak . . . , band yourselves together, organize yourselves . . . and you must win . . . .
When you have made this question ripe for settlement, then and not till then will it be settled.(4)
Against a strong self-reliant force, given wise strategy, disciplined and courageous action, and genuine strength, the dictatorship will eventually crumble. Minimally, however, the above four requirements must be fulfilled.
As the above discussion indicates, liberation from dictatorships ultimately depends on the people’s ability to liberate themselves.
Miami Herald, August 21, 2024
As Venezuelans face political upheaval, Havana should stop interfering in Venezuela’s internal affairs*
By John Suarez
Eleven days before the election, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro predicted a blood bath and a fratricidal civil war if he lost last month’s presidential elections.
On July 28, 2024, opposition candidate Edmundo González defeated Maduro by more than two to one, despite multiple irregularities committed by Maduro regime operatives. González won 67% of the vote, beating Maduro, who garnered 30%.
Now, Maduro is attempting to make his prediction a reality. Thousands of Venezuelans have been arbitrarily detained, and so far 24 have been killed with witnesses identifying government agents in 11 of the extrajudicial deaths, according to Provea, the Venezuela based human rights NGO.
This week, Amnesty International denounced the Maduro government for enacting an “anti-NGO law that punishes efforts to assist victims and defend human rights.” Genocide Watch is reporting that in poor neighborhoods the letter “X” is being painted on people’s homes to show they do not support Maduro, exposing them to possible retaliation.
Things can get a lot worse, especially if Cuba continues to interfere in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
In 2017, Maduro ordered the formation of the FAES – the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian National Police’s Special Action Forces.” According to Caracas Chronicles, “they are police death squads in all but name.”
That same year, the Miami Herald reported that it had a secret recording of a Venezuelan general advocating for the use of snipers against street demonstrators.
A 2019 report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that 6,856 Venezuelans were extrajudicially executed between January 2018 and May 2019 by Maduro’s “security forces, particularly the special forces (FAES).”
Andrés Oppenheimer, syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, wants to know what is holding up the order of arrest for Maduro in his Aug. 17, column, “Human rights leaders demand action: Why is the ICC delaying Maduro’s arrest warrant?”
The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has been looking into Maduro’s possible crimes against humanity for the past six years.
The ICC also looked into Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and in 2023 issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader in less than a year.
And, after a seven-month inquiry, the ICC prosecutor declared in mid-May that he will seek arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and the leader of the terrorist organization Hamas for crimes committed during the Israel-Hamas war that broke out after the October attack on Israel.
Will the ICC finally do the same for Maduro?
The role that Havana is playing during this crucial political crisis inside Venezuela should not be underestimated.
This week, in an interview, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado discussed Havana’s ongoing involvement inside Venezuela. “There are serious complaints from national and international human rights organizations…Several of the Venezuelan opposition victims have reported abuses committed [by Cuban oppressors]. We have known for a long time that Cuba has had a terrible impact in multiple areas: in methods of repression, persecution, espionage, and torture. And we have seen truly heartless things in recent days.”
Others have previously noted Havana’s significant presence in Venezuela. Beginning with guerilla expeditions in the 1960s and culminating in the recruitment of Nicolas Maduro as a Cuban mole, Cuban Communist officials recognized that if Venezuela, with all of its natural resources, fell, the rest of Latin America would soon follow.
Back in 2018, Secretary General Luis Almagro of the Organization of American States warned that “there are an estimated 46,000 Cubans living in Venezuela, part of an occupation force that is trained in repression, intelligence work and tracking the activities of civilians.”
Havana’s intelligence and security apparatus “has created a permissive environment for international terrorists to live and thrive within Venezuela,” reported the U.S. State Department in 2021.
Venezuelan torture victims have testified how their sessions were overseen by the political police at Venezuela’s national intelligence agency, with assistance from Cuban intelligence officers.
As Venezuelans fight for democracy and a fair presidential election in their country, now is the time for the world’s democracies to send a clear and unambiguous message to Havana: Hands off Venezuela! It is long past the time for the Cuban repressive apparatus to leave.
John Suarez is the Executive Director of the Center for a Free Cuba. Suarez was a program officer for Latin America Programs at Freedom House. http://www.cubacenter.org/
https://www.miamiherald.com/
*This was the original suggested title
The Washington Times, August 20, 2024
Free world must impose sanctions on Maduro regime
Countries siding with Venezuelan dictator should also face consequences
By John Suarez
OPINION:
Since Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro launched his attempt to steal the election that he lost in a landslide on July 28, thousands have been detained, 24 Venezuelans have been killed by government agents, and threats are made daily by the regime that it will go against Venezuelan opposition leaders Edmundo Gonzalez or Maria Corina Machado.
Many underestimate the role of Cuba in the present crisis. The Castro regime assisted Hugo Chavez in his rise to power in Venezuela in 1999, and oversaw the succession of Mr. Maduro, who took over when Chavez died of cancer in 2013.
“It is estimated that the Cuban presence in Venezuela is 46,000 people, an occupation force that teaches to torture, to repress, to do intelligence tasks, civil documentation, migration,” said Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, on Dec. 7, 2018.
“Venezuela has turned into an ally in the region of Russia, Iran, China, Cuba,” Ms. Machado said in her Aug. 11 interview on CNN with Fareed Zakaria. In the interview, she also observed that “Venezuela is a safe haven for irregular activities of criminal networks that are spreading in the region, not only narco trafficking, but illegal mining, traffic of human beings.”
The Cuban military dictatorship facilitated these relationships between Venezuela, Iran, China, Russia, and criminal networks involved in drug trafficking, as well as the creation of new ones such as the Soles Cartel, which is linked to the Venezuelan military . Havana served as a middle-man building alliances with regimes hostile to the United States and seeking to expand their influence in the Western Hemisphere to counter U.S. power.
In May, the Casla Institute, an organization that promotes democracy and the rule of law based in the Czech Republic, documented in its annual report how Cuban officials oversee, with Mr. Maduro’s approval, the repressive apparatus in Venezuela. Cuban officials are “the ‘experts’ who direct the torture to make the detainees say what the regime needs,” the report said.
“We have the largest torture center in Latin America,” Ms. Corina Machado said in her February 7, 2024, appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
The Venezuelan opposition leader added, “Cuban agents have been involved in torture cases in our country.”
The crisis stems from the Biden administration’s gambit of promising sanctions relief and normalized ties in exchange for free and fair elections. The more unified and well-organized democratic opposition in Venezuela is exposing the dictatorship’s falsehood, while simultaneously maintaining nonviolent discipline in the face of repeated acts of violence and repression by regime agents and their sympathizers.
What is happening in Venezuela is part of a disturbing pattern.
The Biden Administration loosened sanctions on both Russia, and Iran providing the hostile nations with more resources. The results have been disastrous. In the case of Moscow, as troops amassed on the border of Ukraine, the United States threatened new sanctions if the invasion materialized, but did not apply them before Vladimir Putin invaded in February 2022.
Iran was provided with more resources while cracking down on Iran’s pro-democracy movement, and funded its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, and Hezbollah to increase their attacks on Israel.
Today there are wars in Europe and the Middle East, and a huge loss of life, and it appears that this policy of loosening sanctions and inviting more chaos will now engulf Latin America.
The Biden Administration made a deal with Mr. Maduro that if he held free elections, then the United States would lift all sanctions, and normalize relations with Venezuela. This has created a crisis that can benefit the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people who voted for change by an overwhelming majority on July 28.
Through diplomatic channels and nonviolent means, including sanctions, democratic nations have the opportunity to pressure Maduro to respect the results of the Venezuelan presidential election. There will be hemispheric repercussions if the democratic world is unable to effectively assist Venezuelans defend their popular sovereignty using nonviolent means.
Caracas has bought a large quantity of heavy weapons from Moscow, and Tehran. Mr. Maduro in 2023 began threatening to invade and annex Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of neighboring Guyana’s territory, to stoke nationalist sentiment in Venezuela, and seize its rich oil deposits. It is highly likely that if Mr. Maduro survives the electoral challenge from Mr. González that he will pursue war with Guyana in an attempt to gain support but more importantly to advance Russian, Chinese, and Iranian objectives in the South Atlantic.
The democratic world must do more now to rally, work together,and impose multilateral sanctions to ostracize the Venezuelan dictatorship as was done with the apartheid regime in South Africa. It must target individual Venezuelan officials who engaged in crimes against humanity with sanctions and charges in the International Criminal Court. Other countries siding with Mr. Maduro must also be sanctioned and publicly called out.
The future of Latin America will be decided in Venezuela over the next few weeks, and if autocracy triumphs, war is bound to follow. Providing carrots, such as amnesty and safe harbor is fine. But sticks must also be displayed to discourage the continued brutalization of Venezuelans.
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro’s Washington Times opinion piece on July 30 calling for the U.S. to “arrest Maduro on 2020 narco-terrorism charges” raises the question: Is there a red notice out on Nicolas Maduro with interpol?
• John Suarez is a human rights activist and executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba and a former program officer for Latin America Programs at Freedom House.
https://www.washingtontimes.
Miami Herald August 1, 2024
Reflections on nonviolent resistance in Venezuela | Opinion
By Regis Iglesias Ramírez And John Suárez
The Venezuelan people and democratic leaders now have a duty to defend popular sovereignty as demonstrated civically through their vote for freedom, and they appear to be doing so.
Some may argue that they should not have gone to the elections with a National Electoral Council that is an extension of the chavista regime, among other adversities and evidence that fraud, as in previous occasions, would be the regime’s way of maintaining power, delaying the inevitable day of freedom.
The process should have been contested when chavismo violated the Barbados accords and María Corina Machado was barred from participating as a candidate.
It should have been flagged the moment international observers were denied entry after it was decided they’d participate in the elections, and the irregularities that occurred during the day, which exemplified the gangster-like chavista regime’s intentions, should have been more forcefully denounced.
Despite the regime’s perverted and criminal nature, which is true of communist governments, the Venezuelans chose to accept the challenge. They opted to vote for Edmundo González , and the vast majority supported change.
This happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Chile, and South Africa. People under repressive regimes, as Venezuelans are now doing, follow agreements between the parties to promote and ensure the legitimacy of those processes. They overcame tyranny by their ballots because their leaders were steadfast, and the international community was supportive.
Those who ignore this and try to diminish the civic struggle that people have chosen to achieve their freedom or who undervalue nonviolence as a path to free and prosperous societies have every right to believe otherwise. Still, violence is not a guarantee of success.
In their 2008 study “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” university academics Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth compared the outcomes of 323 violent and nonviolent resistance actions from 1900 to 2006. They found that major nonviolent initiatives were successful 53% of the time, compared to 26% of violent resistance actions.
The investigation additionally demonstrates “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent campaigns in the face of brutal repression.”
Those who believe in and offer extreme remedies, which are not radical because radical means getting to the root of the problem, and the central issue in totalitarian systems is a lack of popular sovereignty, should amass troops and war resources to achieve their objective. However, this would be a mistake because violence rarely results in freedom or healthy nations.
In 1981, Narcotics Anonymous published “the basic text,” which stated that “insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” The same is true for both addicts and people who resort to violence.
What will happen in Venezuela now is up to democratic leaders and their voters. Let us hope Venezuelans do not grow weary but continue in their civic demand through their mobilization for the nation’s freedom.
What will the international community do? The Biden administration said Thursday it is getting ready to officially recognize González as the country’s president-elect.
This is also a subject free nations must address. The supportive position is to refuse to recognize the dictator and establish an independent commission to review all voting records and thus declare the civic opposition’s victory, as all evidence indicates is the will of the Venezuelan people.
If those who have taken over Venezuela over the past 25 years do not accept it, then impose an international boycott, as was done in Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. We have requested the same sanctions for Communist Cuba, as well as for Maduro’s dictatorship.
Venezuelans are ultimately the protagonists. They will determine whether they will overcome tyranny this time or whether they will have to wait over 65 years to obtain their freedom, as we Cubans still do.
Regis Iglesias Ramírez is the spokesperson for the Christian Liberation Movement. John J. Suárez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba