Tourists sip cocktails in state-owned Cuban resorts while local children go without milk. Venezuelan students sit in crumbling schools while the illegitimate dictatorship spends millions on propaganda and spyware.
These aren’t isolated failures — they’re symptoms of a larger design. The economic crises in Cuba and Venezuela weren’t imported. They are homegrown.
Both incompetent regimes have long blamed foreign forces and external pressure for their hardships. But the truth is simpler — and more damning. Decades of corruption, economic mismanagement and elite enrichment have hollowed out once-functioning economies and left ordinary people to pay the price.
Cuba: Empty hotels, full regime pockets
Once proud of its sugar exports and medical system, Cuba now imports sugar, faces routine blackouts and suffers shortages of medical care. Yet in 2024, according to Spanish newswire Agencia EFE , the Cuban regime allocated more than 37% of its total investment to the tourism and hospitality sector — over 11 times more than it spent on health care and education combined. Existing hotels sit largely empty, with occupancy rates hovering around 30%, but construction of new resorts continues.
Who benefits? Cuban military conglomerates like GAESA, FINCIMEX and CIMEX and the regime officials who run them. These entities dominate the island’s tourism, remittance and retail sectors, serving the regime’s elite, not the public. Cubans struggle with fuel, food and electricity shortages while resources are funneled into beach resorts and regime-tied vanity projects that can be privatized to their elite managers when the regime collapses, as occurred in the Soviet Union.
Venezuela: Propaganda over progress
In Venezuela, a different flag waves over the same broken model, which is propped up by the Cuban security services that monitor and intimidate the Venezuelan armed forces. Bloomberg News reports that in 2024, the Maduro regime spent more than $2 billion in a few months — the highest spending rate of the year, hitting just as a presidential election was held. Despite the fact that $1.7 billion in taxes was collected that same month, the minimum wage remained under $2 per month, less than the cost of a kilo of cheese.
News reports in late 2023 note the regime claimed to double its 2024 national budget to over $20.5 billion, ostensibly for economic growth. But according to the news site teleSUR, only $180 million — less than 1% — was allocated to the health sector . And while military intelligence received nearly $1 billion for counterintelligence technology for internal repression (including of military officers), just $18 million was set aside to feed over 5 million schoolchildren. That’s $3.49 per student, per year.
Venezuela’s infrastructure reflects these distorted priorities. A 2009 $7.5 billion railway deal with China resulted in nothing but abandoned construction sites, yet the debt continues to be paid in discounted oil. In Venezuela, blackouts regularly plunge large swaths of the country into darkness.
The online Spanish-language site El Impulso reports that one 2024 power outage affected 16 states, followed by another just days later that left 20 states without electricity for over 12 hours. Years of regime neglect, theft and corruption are to blame.
Mismanagement or a corrupt model?
These aren’t policy mistakes; they’re features of economic systems built to preserve authoritarian power.
- In Cuba, military-run companies dominate the economy, and investments are made not based on need, but on profit for regime officials.
- In Venezuela, vast public spending props up stolen elections and propaganda, while hospitals and schools deteriorate. Massive debts are accumulated and repaid through oil at a reduced price, robbing future generations of their prosperity.
The Cuban and Venezuelan people are resourceful and resilient, but no amount of ingenuity can overcome systems that prioritize propaganda, power and personal gain for corrupt political leaders and elites over the public well-being.
The path forward
The international community must continue to expose the lack of freedom, corruption, cronyism and economic mismanagement of these regimes and amplify the voices of the Cuban and Venezuelan people demanding access to health care, electricity, fuel, basic hygiene items, medicine and food missing from the shelves.
The international community must amplify the voices of the Cuban and Venezuelan people demanding the ability to engage with the outside world economically, free of the repressive controls of the corrupt regimes.
Real change begins with transparency, accountability and an economic model that puts citizens — not regime officials — at its center.
The economic crises in Cuba and Venezuela weren’t imported. They were built, brick by brick, by regimes that continue to choose absolute control and self-enrichment over freedom.
https://share.america.gov/cuban-venezuelan-regimes-put-officials-over-citizens/
From the archives
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.