The Leninist cage

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

Eighty-five percent of Venezuelans did not want Chávez to seize Radio Caracas Televisión. That, more or less, is the proportion of those who also do not want a dictatorship like Cuba’s to be imposed in Venezuela; who do not want private property or all of education to go into the hands of the State. Venezuelans -- including half of those who back Chávez -- reject the creation of a totalitarian State similar to the one erected in Cuba by Fidel Castro almost half a century ago.

The great majority are individualists who love freedom in the intuitive, simple and diaphanous way with which that feeling can be defined, without the need to go into profound philosophical disquisitions. They choose to make their own decisions, not to depend on a State that guides their lives as if they were lambs without intelligence or will power.

Chávez decided the opposite, however. His cry, “Socialism, motherland or death,” is something more than a tired echo, copied from the ideological screeching in Havana. It encapsulates a transcendental decision -- to round up all Venezuelans in an institutional cage similar to the one in Cuba and lead them, at the crack of a whip, to happiness, prosperity and final victory against the cruel capitalistic imperialism.

That's the only way to interpret the confiscation of RCTV, the hounding of Globovisión, the threats to the newspapers and the banking industry, the confrontation with the Church and the incitement to the illegal occupation of lands and properties. That's one way to understand the creation of armed paramilitary groups allied to Chavismo, and the growing control of the Cuban intelligence corps, an omniscient master of the private lives of military officers, opposition leaders and, in general, of the Venezuelan ruling class.

Venezuela today is a country subtly occupied by Cuba for the purpose of building the Leninist cage, just as in the 1960s Cuba was a country occupied by 40,000 Russians who carefully built a dictatorial scaffolding with blueprints drawn in the U.S.S.R.

Except that this sad reality leads us to ask two questions. First, why did Chávez -- who presumably intended to launch a “21st-Century socialism” to overcome the horrors of real communism -- resorted in the end to the old, cruel and failed Leninist model? And second, how likely is it that this revival of the old dictatorship designed in the extinct U.S.S.R. will impose itself gradually and become permanent?

The first question is easy to answer. Chávez chooses the communist dictatorial model because he realizes, in amazement, that his entire political discourse was nothing more than a shower of spit with which no one could possibly govern. All that blather about the new axis of development in the Orinoco region, of the third universal theory advanced by Qaddafi (another fool with a turban and a pistol), of a unifying trade-by-barter and local currencies served only to accelerate the dissolution of authority, while society plunged into disorder.

Leninism was something else and a lot more serious, however: controls, locks, organized repression, the throttling of the opposition, obligatory obedience, image-projection devices, international support networks, and all the other tools of governance. Of course, Leninism is a perverse, unproductive and clumsy way to organize people and force them to obey, but at least it's an efficient enough method of control to keep the reins of power in Chávez's hands.

The answer to the second question is more speculative, but equally obvious: in the medium or long range, that anachronistic absurdity cannot possibly triumph. Communism, which failed in the U.S.S.R. and everywhere else including Cuba (whose society will begin to shake it off as soon as Fidel Castro dies), will not take root in Venezuela.

Why? Because Chávez, though he has the worst possible instincts -- his current ambassador to the U.N. has said he is a murderer -- is neither feared nor respected; because his claim that the poor are on his side is not true; because the Armed Forces have not been totally co-opted and corrupted; and because Venezuelans are deeply disgusted for having become a political colony of Havana, a penurious and beggarly country they themselves subsidize to the tune of about $3 billion per year, the price of Chávez pay-as-you-go dictatorship.

June 5, 2007

Print this page