Venezuela’s collapse. And Cuba.

Cuban doctors in Venezuela (credit: Caracas Chronicles)

[update below]

Returning to serious subjects (see previous post), the headline article on The New York Times website yesterday, datelined Maracaibo, should be mandatory reading for anyone who has defended or apologized for Nicolás Maduro and his Ubuesque regime: “Venezuela’s collapse is the worst outside of war in decades, economists say.” The lede: “Butchers have stopped selling meat cuts in favor of offal, fat shavings and cow hooves, the only animal protein many of their customers can afford.”

The roots of the economic disaster in Venezuela are well-understood: see, e.g., the numerous links in my February 2nd post on Venezuela and the left. And those who have 25 minutes to spare may watch the lecture by Amherst College political scientist Javier Corrales last November 1st on “What explains Venezuela’s economic catastrophe?” In this respect, one needs to be clear about at least one thing, which is that the Venezuelan economic collapse is not the consequence of the Trump regime’s sanctions, which have surely aggravated the situation but in no way brought it about. But it’s the knee-jerk reaction of gauchistes, and on all continents, to reflexively blame US imperialism for the economic ruin in Latin American and other dictatorships they uncritically defend. To be sure, economic sanctions that punish a population are indefensible, and in any and all circumstances, as not only do they not bring a regime to heel but, in fact, reinforce it. On this, see Peter Beinart’s piece (June 5, 2018) in The Atlantic, “How sanctions feed authoritarianism.” And if they do end up crippling the targeted economy, it is only after many years, certainly not a few months, which is how long Trump’s sanctions have been in place.

À propos, on the US sanctions regime and Cuba, I wrote back in December 2014:

…Cuba’s economic problems have nothing to do with the idiotic, pointless US embargo—an embargo which, in fact, strengthened the Communist regime and its administered economy, with the Soviet Union paying above world market prices for Cuban sugar and offering all sorts of subsidies… With the end of the Soviet Union and its subsidies, the Cuban economy went into a tailspin, the country was pauperized, and with it producing, as in 1959, little for export apart from agricultural commodities and raw materials.

On Cuba and Venezuela, Cuban-born, Brazil-based journalist Jorge Carrasco has an informative article in Foreign Policy (May 14th), “Venezuelan democracy was strangled by Cuba: Decades of infiltration helped ruin a once-prosperous nation.”

Cuba’s relationship with Venezuela over the past two decades is well known. What is less well known is the subject of a complaint issued on May 8th before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, accusing the Cuban state of practicing outright “slavery,” which one learns about in a page 4 article in Le Monde dated May 15th, “Plainte devant la Cour pénale internationale pour ‘esclavagisme’ contre Cuba.” The lede: “Des associations dénoncent les conditions de travail des médecins envoyés en mission internationale.” The associations filing the complaint are the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU)—a dissident organization inside Cuba, which is naturally illegal and whose members are subject to repression—and the Madrid-based Cuban Prisoner Defenders, and the subject of which is the working conditions of the hundreds of thousands of medical doctors Cuba has sent to numerous countries, which has become an instrument of Cuban foreign policy and an important source of revenue for state coffers. The salaries of the Cuban doctors are paid by international organizations or the foreign governments themselves, but the Cuban state confiscates up to 90% of those salaries. The doctors are given a meager stipend, kept under constant surveillance by Cuban security agents—with their movements and activities restricted, and no informal contact with the local population permitted—and with severe consequences for them and their families—who are not allowed to accompany them abroad—if they opt not to return to Cuba when ordered. The Cuban state, in defense of the garnishing of the salaries, argues that the cost of the doctors’ training was entirely paid by the state. The problem with this retort is that the amount of the debt is arbitrarily determined by the state—there’s no contract involved—and lasts a lifetime, i.e. it’s never paid off.

By any juridical definition of slavery or indentured servitude, this is most surely it. I will not hold my breath waiting for defenders of the Cuban regime to admit it. The subject of the ICC complaint seems not to have received a lot of coverage in English-language media: the BBC website had a piece, “The hidden world of the doctors Cuba sends overseas,” and there was a matter-of-fact dispatch in a website I would rather not mention. The story merits more.

The Le Monde article concludes with Cuban doctors abroad who were interviewed by the two dissident associations speaking of the systematic falsification of medical statistics inside Cuba and on “a massive scale.” I’ve long suspected this to be the case, that the statistics provided by the Cuban state on its fabulous health care system were too good to be true. If the statistics provided by the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc satellites turned out to be bogus, why would such not also be the case for the communist regime in Cuba—and which is no less repressive than the worst of the Warsaw Pact states? Seriously?

UPDATE: University of Washington political science professor Jamie Mayerfeld, who specializes in political theory and human rights, has posted the following on his Facebook page (April 4, 2020):

I recently finished Armando Valladares’s [1985] prison memoir “Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag,” and I highly recommend it. Too few people know about the brutality and sadism of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. This is in part because, as a ruthless dictator, Castro knew how to use censorship, propaganda, and above all terror to cast a blanket over his crimes. It is in part because much of the Western left, valuing Castro as an enemy of US imperialism, and succumbing to the romantic mystique around Fidel and Che Guevara, has been unwilling to come to terms with Cuba’s realities. Awareness is still lacking. Even many of the leftists who today acknowledge that Castro was a dictator guilty of grave abuses still do not appreciate the depth and scale of his cruelties. Valladares’s book is important as a chronicle of those cruelties; I hope more people read it and absorb what it has to say. The book is important, too, because it is a brilliantly written account of the reality of prison life, with broad lessons about state violence and resistance to it. Some (not all) of what Valladares describes is similar to the experience of many prisoners around in the world. It is a classic of prison literature, a work that should be widely read and widely assigned in courses on human rights, prisons, and resistance to state violence.

Le livre d’Armando Valladarès a été publié en français sous le titre Mémoires de Prison: Un témoignage hallucinant sur les prisons de Castro (Albin Michel, 1986).