Michael Rowan / Becoming Cuba

The worst fraud in history is Cuba, which is being repeated in Venezuela. The suppression of freedom in Cuba was a horrible crime against humanity, but it was not unique. Unfortunately, the 20th century was littered with similar crimes perpetrated by Nazis from the right and Communists from the left, among others. Yet what's different about Cuba is how its destruction of freedom for millions of people was celebrated by credible outside observers as if it was a great achievement for humanity. This is by far the worst fraud in modern history.

The perpetrators of that fraud range all the way from European intellectuals to Hollywood to the New York Times. And the fraud continues to this day. Imagine if what happened in Cuba were prepared in the abstract for objective analysis: no civilized observer in the world would credit what happened in Cuba as a human achievement. Yet Che Guevara and Fidel Castro became American idols, glorified in movies and news as quintessential rebels, and still are. No rational assembly of facts appears able to sustain the heady oxygen depletion of climbing to the top of the mountain created by this fraud, which stands as the Himalaya of political ignorance in our time.

And nowhere has the fraud planted roots as deep as in Venezuela. It inspired the coup attempts of 1992, the election of a rebel in 1998, and the destruction of freedom that has happened since. But there are two versions of what has happened since. One version deals with facts and the other deals with an illusion. As in Cuba, the Venezuelan illusion has more power and money behind it than the bothersome facts. This is especially the case for world observers who look at Venezuela through the same rose-colored lenses used to view Cuba. Chávez, while not as smart as Fidel or as charismatic as Che, basks in the same fraudulent light. The fraud is so imbedded in Venezuela that it has the power of law and all the oil money in the country behind it. To doubt the illusion or to depend on the facts is a very dangerous game in Venezuela, which as we all know, is perfect.

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