DEATH THROES OF SOCIALISM

The Wall Street Journal reports that our administration’s pressure on Venezuela is bringing Cuba’s Communist regime to the brink of collapse. Two birds with one stone, you might say. I wonder, though: how can you collapse when you are already flat on the ground?

Cubans are going hungry, suffering from spreading disease and sleeping outdoors with no electricity to power fans through the sweltering nights. A quarter of the population has fled during the island’s most prolonged economic crisis.

No one, on the other hand, is moving into Cuba. It is sort of like California, only farther down the road.

More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, many of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, hundreds of thousands of them to the U.S., according to calculations of a Havana-based demographer, Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos.
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Luis Robles, 33 years old, a political prisoner in Cuba until October and now in exile in Spain, said, “The situation for ordinary Cubans is very hard.”

Nearly 90% of people live in extreme poverty, and 70% go without at least a meal a day, said the Social Rights Observatory, a think tank that conducted a month of polling this past summer. For more than 70% of Cubans, their main concerns are the lack of food and the constant blackouts, which can go for 18 hours or more a day in some regions. The observatory found that 78% intend to flee the island.

Under free enterprise, a handful of celebrities say they. want to leave, and one or two actually do. Under socialism, 78% intend to get out.

Water availability is intermittent, leaving Cubans sometimes unable to bathe, wash dishes or flush toilets.

An obvious question: given that Cuba produces virtually nothing, how has it been able to keep Venezuelan oil flowing all these years, even as Venezuela itself is hopelessly impoverished? The answer is that Cuba has the one thing that Maduro needs most:

Agents from Cuba’s vaunted intelligence service remain in Venezuela, where they have worked to purge disloyal military officers and government officials, helping ensure Maduro remains ensconced in power.

Cuba’s deep reliance on Venezuela means Cuba’s Communist government is doing all it can to prevent Maduro—who trained in Cuba as a young man—from being forced from office in his greatest challenge after nearly 13 years in office. That means ensuring he is always surrounded by security and loyal aides, with no one carrying cellphones or other electronic devices.

Pagers can be dangerous.

But what has remained a constant in Venezuela is Cuba’s security apparatus, which is used to crush uprisings and detect coup plotting, former Venezuelan and U.S. officials said.

Andrés Izarra, a former Venezuelan minister who broke with the regime and now lives in exile, recalled how Cuban counterintelligence officials kept a close eye for any sign of dissent.

“With Maduro, the Cuban intelligence services multiplied,” he said. “All the Cubans would be spying on you.”

We have seen this before: in end-stage socialism, the government’s only area of expertise is “security”–meaning the ability to spy on, and to torture and murder, those who would stand up to the regime. So far, at least, those barbaric skills have been enough to keep both the Chavez/Maduro government and Cuban Communists astride their miserable subjects. The end can’t come soon enough.