Friday, December 24, 2010

The Cuban Perestroika, cultural impact

Authors:
José Alberto López Rafaschieri and Luis Alberto López Rafaschieri
www.morochos.net

The Berlin Wall fell down, the Soviet Union disappeared, the United States won the Cold War, China opened up to capitalism, the standard of living in South Korea is better than in North Korea and, generally, socialism proved to be a failure in all regions where it was tested. But in Latin America, many of these events were seen as distant stories that had nothing to do with local realities.

Like a teenager in love, many continued to believe in the myths of the fantasy, so for politicians, intellectuals, businessmen and ordinary Spanish speakers, the dictatorship of Fidel remained the same paradise of freedom and social welfare that existed only in the heads of the hippies. "In Cuba, health care is free, people are really happy and roses are redder", phrases like these could be heard in Latin American universities and centers of power even at the beginning of the XXI century.

Unfortunately for the regional communist thought, denial is a psychological defense mechanism that is not very reliable for keeping secrets. The truth has begun to explode in the Mecca of the Latino communism, so the re-structuring of the Cuban model will be something so close that would teach Latin American what they should have learned long ago about socialism. And as one day Castro's Cuba influenced many to insist on Communist system's error, it should now provoke the discredit of that ideology in the area.

Unlike the twentieth century, this socialist collapse is not happening in Europe or Asia, but in one of the most important symbols of the Latin American culture, so its impact should be greatest in the island and its sphere of influence.

Cuba is a small country geographically and economically, but ideologically, this nation affects the region like no other, even more than States such as Mexico, Brazil or Argentina. A lot of Latin American politicians wait for Fidel before expressing any opinion, only that this time, the philosophy of the Cuban government points to anti-Communist reforms (privatization and economic liberalization), which could mean an ideological earthquake for the left in Brazil and Spanish America.


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Friday, December 17, 2010

Evo, what has Marxism done for the environment?

Authors:
Luis Alberto López Rafaschieri and José Alberto López Rafaschieri
www.morochos.net

In the present age, one would expect the global warming debate to be focused on the development of renewable energy, the more efficient management of natural resources, the geo-engineering, the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and the legal reforms that can cushion the impact of human activity on the planet. Unfortunately, a Latin American government trying to divert the discussion to issues specific to a time before the Internet could not miss at the Summit of Climate Change in Cancun, revisiting the idea of dismantling capitalism as the great panacea for saving the world from all the problems that afflict it.

"Either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies", was the approach that brought Evo Morales to Mexico, returning us to a time when foreign policy was based on the acceptance or rejection of Marxism. But of course, for those who live in Latin America it is nothing new to see a politician explaining each event with the Leninist ideology, or that leaders like Chavez and Morales never knew the failure of communism in all regions where it was tested.

What can socialist regimes teach us about environmental policy? The worst nuclear disaster happened on Earth occurred in Chernobyl, then one of the republics of the USSR. The title of global largest emitter of carbon dioxide is held by China. Much of the water consumed in Vietnam has so much pollution that the issue has repeatedly been qualified by UNICEF as a "pressing environmental problem". North Korea has serious air pollution records because that nation produces enough of its energy from coal. And Laos is one of countries with highest deforestation rate, while Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia lost respectively 1.97%, 0.55% and 0.45% (per year) of its trees between 1990 and 2010.

Clearly, the socialist models have no moral authority to criticize capitalism for the environmental degradation, so it's obvious that the solution to climate change is not in the Communists schemes of economic organization.


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Friday, December 10, 2010

The intellectual Anglo-Saxonism of Chavez

Authors:
José Alberto López Rafaschieri and Luis Alberto López Rafaschieri
www.morochos.net

Every time Chavez has needed an ideologist to formalize the theoretical underpinnings of his political project (supposedly indigenous, African-American, anti-imperialist and friend of the marginalized), it is noteworthy that, contrary to what the bolivarian revolution preaches, he has always appealed to North American, German or British intellectuals.

When Chavez wanted someone to explain that he had been the victim of a coup in April 2002 and that his socialist revolution lived under constant threat from the United States, he did not seek an Amazonian Indian, he instructed Eva Golinger, American journalist and lawyer, to capture everything in a book - "The Chavez Code" - and in other publications.

Later, he needed someone to tell the world what the Venezuelan XXI Century Socialism is, and Chavez do not seek any national academic to entrust the task, but ordered to call the German sociologist Heinz Dieterich.

Sometime after, in 2009, Chavez decided that a film would revive faith in his leadership, but he doesn't seek the help of Venezuelan or Latin American filmmakers. He tried again with an Anglo-Saxon, Oliver Stone, who made for him a piece of political propaganda called "South of the Border."

Then comes 2010, chavismo gets fewer votes than the opposition in the September parliamentary elections, and this time, Chavez thinks he needs a thinker to develop a document for: 1) questioning the opposition victory, 2) re-selling the neocastrista project to Venezuelans, and 3) giving to the party the lines of action for the immediate future. But again, "el comandante" does not consider prudent to assign the task to any mulatto, so he sent for the Welsh Alan Woods.

There is clearly a racist pattern in Chavez when choosing his ideologist, especially considering that, in none of the cases cited, the Venezuelan president has hired black intellectuals from those lands, all of them are Anglo-Saxons with well-defined Caucasians features. Why he never resorts to Negroid people or Venezuelans as Professor Carlos Escarra, for example, for these assignments? Could it be that, in the logic of Chavez, the northern white is better creating ideas?


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