[Marxism] passing shot re the vzlan referendum

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Greg writes: "I have a really hard time believing that people who voted for
Chavez consistently in the past could actually believe that their homes and
children would be confiscated from them by the state if they voted si in
this referendum."

Well, believe it! 

When the CIA tried the same thing in Cuba in 1960-1962, they actually got
parents to send their children --by the thousands!-- unaccompanied to the
United States. 

And that was from the middle and upper classes that had the possibility to
do so -- and to know better than to do so. And they nevertheless did do so
-- and massively.

The way it was done is that the CIA cooked up a supposedly secret draft "Law
on the Nationalization of Children" which was said to have been extracted
from the office of the Prime Minister [Fidel]. At the time, Cuba no longer
had a bourgeois media nor a bourgeoisie in control of businesses. Still,
through a network of foreign agents and traitors the news was spread and
"visa waivers" were handed out. These were good only for children  --not
their parents--, and with them an airline would let you board a flight out
of the country. The general idea being that the parents would rise up to
overthrow Fidel to be reunited with their children. 

FOURTEEN THOUSAND CHILDREN --in  a country with a population of only 6
million people, but in reality out of a middle/upper class of hundreds of
thousands-- were sent to the United States, some to be housed with friends
and relatives (my own family took one in), others in a camp whose reputation
among Cuban children --and not only the children-- in Miami was so dark that
Cuban mothers, when at the end of their rope, would threaten their kids,
"I'm going to send you to Matacumbe," as the main camp was called.

I should add that the CIA-controlled counterrevolutionary network involved
in this crime, this cruelest of all crimes against humanity, because the
victims were first and foremost children uprooted from the love and care of
their parents, was the Catholic Church. And cruelest because it was
precisely that parental love that was manipulated to deprive the children of
it.

So when I read today about how supposedly some good devout Catholics got the
crap beat out of them by cops in Havana, I'll confess there is still a not
so tiny part of me that said, right on! Just a part. Mostly the rest of me
laughed at the crude imperialist fabrication, but should there be an ounce
of truth in it ... well, there is a part of me that says, anyone hanging out
in a Papist temple has it coming. Especially and most of all any CUBAN. 

This horrendous division of families was put an end to by the brilliant
tactics and profound humanity of the greatest revolutionary of our epoch,
Fidel. 

The way this family division was finally ended is that "someone" in Miami
said what needed to be done is to go to Cuba to pick up the parents (and
other relatives). Nowadays I think those who still concern themselves with
these long ago issues would agree that quite likely, the "someone" was one
of Fidel's operatives, or inspired by one -- but just who I've never
discovered, though I'll confess that while I've been interested in the
identity of the person who got the ball rolling, I've not been obsessed by
it.

Anyways, Fidel immediately responded that people who weren't coming on the
warpath would not be received with cannon fire, they would be received
civilly, and opened the port of Camarioca so people could come in small
boats from Miami to pick up their relatives. And this created a political
scandal for the Johnson administration, which then agreed to send
twice-weekly "freedom flights" from Miami to retrieve relatives of those
already here. Because although some parents had managed to reunite with
their children by the time the operation ended (when the U.S. unilaterally
cancelled commercial air service to Cuba in 1962 at the time of the missile
crisis), most parents had not. 

More than once in the late 60's I watched the tearful reunion of young men
--my friends, even one who for a few years was an older brother to me-- with
those who had been the parents of the child my friends had been. And years
later, at a nochebuena (Christmas eve feast) I asked one of those fathers,
who was talking --crying-- about not having seen his child become a man why
they did it, why they sent him to the United States. And he said that since
Fidel had nationalized even the giant American corporations, they did not
doubt he might do so to their own children, when the priest warned them. 

BTW, just to show that there simply is no bottom to the cynicism of the
Papist and CIA scum, just as there is no end to their criminality, they
called this "Operation Peter Pan."

Those who speak Spanish and want to familiarize themselves with the exact
provisions of the "Law on the Nationalization of Children" can go to youtube
and search for recent Venezuelan radio broadcasts and telephone "push
polling." 

It's been years since I last saw my copy of the "Law on the Nationalization
of Children" --yes, I once had a copy-- but I'm certain that what I heard on
youtube from a link someone sent me and that I haven't kept, what
Venezuelans have been told in recent weeks that their government is
planning, is word-for-word the provisions of that phony 1960 draft law.

Because when you read something as absurd as that on their third birthday,
parents shall take their child and his or her clothes and toys to the state
daycare center for the state to raise them and guide them, you do not
forget. EVER. 

Not if it played as much of a role in your own family and that of your
friends as it did in mine. 

Because I lost a brother when I was starting high school. He was now in
college, but after a year or so, he no longer came home for the holidays or
the summer. The reconstitution of his own family meant my losing part of
mine. And as a fifteen and sixteen year old what I felt was guilt at missing
my now ex-brother. 

I think some comrades may have noticed a certain ... depth of feeling when I
start talking about issues relating to racism and white supremacy. That's
part of the reason. They don't do this to white people, not by the thousands
and tens of thousands. Not in this country. And figuring out years later how
and why it happened doesn't remove the scars. 

And, yes, I will confess, that when I see one of these papist scum, these
robed reactionaries of the ruling rich, dressed in medieval drag and
preaching on Venezuela's Globovision about Chavez's "power grab," knowing
what is going on behind the scenes, what fears and rumors such vague general
terms are mean to stoke, I wish for that old-style ultraleftism, that
someone put a bullet through that Papist imperialist puppet's brain, instead
of selling silly papers calling for a boycott or abstention of the electoral
farce. 

And, yes, I know it's wrong, counterproductive, and counterproductive to the
max. And if I have any way to influence such an event, I would consciously
and rationally bend every ounce of energy to preventing it. But I can't help
the way I feel, and were it to happen, I'd be thinking of Malcolm X, and
chickens coming home to roost. I'd be glad. Yes I would.

Which is all my way of saying to Greg, don't just believe something like
this could fuck up what is, in the last analysis, a not-very-important
popular consultation in a form not much unlike bourgeois electoral farces.
This kind of manipulation can fuck up the lives of real people, by the
thousands, and even millions, if done on the scale of a much larger country
than Cuba. And even those caught in its periphery might wind up with scars
that will disappear only when we become worm farms.

*  *  *

I do not think that comrades from the imperialist world really appreciate
colonialism and neocolonialism, and what it does to people --persons-- and
to a people: how it keeps them submerged in ignorance, in superstitious
submission to the words of the minister --whether Religious or
Governmental-- and in awe to the mythical land of superman, hummers and
"shock and awe," the United States of Amerikkka. 

Or the absolute cynicism and shamelessness of the bourgeois press, and most
of all their OWN bourgeois press, the famous three-letter news networks and
daily newspapers headquartered in New York. 

Because I live in that world of shamelessness, I know for a fact, from my
own lived experienced, that, for example, certain TV channels in Venezuela
report complete fabrications, including about supposed attacks on foreign
news organizations, including last Sunday. And that the reason the false
reports are broadcast or printed are direct orders from the boss -- not the
supervisor but the big boss, the owner or general manager. And that knowing
the truth about this, the big international brand names in news do not
report it.

Just like at the time of the coup, Venezuelan media bosses called and begged
foreign news organizations to stop their reporting on the mass mobilization
surrounding the Miraflores palace, because they were only encouraging the
rabble with their reporting, and they were going to ruin everything. 

That this was done in Venezuelan newsrooms is a matter of public record,
immortalized in the film the revolution will not be televised and especially
in former CNN staffer Andres Izarra's sworn testimony to the Venezuelan
Congress on how he and his staff (he was then head of a Venezuelan
broadcaster's newsroom) were ORDERED not to report and sent home. 

And these things not only have been kept from the public, but even from the
majority of the newsroom staffs of the famous international news brands,
treated as a matter of management-to-management "business" with other news
organizations, making them the sole purview of upper management. 

And then everyone is shocked when --as happened again today-- Chávez lashes
out at the famous international brand names in news as vile tools of
reaction because these same news organization picked up a story from the
lying local bourgeois media about how Chavez supposedly had to be pressured
by the army into allowing the referendum results to be announced.

*  *  *

How could it be that something as absurd as three-year-olds being
"nationalized" wasn't effectively countered? I have only impressions and
guesses from afar. 

But for what it is worth, I believe that the key weaknesses we're seeing
stem from a lack of a consolidated cadre, to begin with, a layer of a half
dozen or a dozen other top leaders immediately around Chávez, but extending
to the lack of a cohered political organization, the lack of a really
systematic approach in developing the mass movement into organizations and
so on.

Compare the Venezuelan process to others: