Richard Barnes

Early 20th Century Communist Activity in Cuba and Venezuela

March 9, 2022March 9, 2022 Richard Barnes

“[T]he Venezuelan Army could not be relied upon to protect the country from a Communist takeover because its leadership was too compromised. And many decent Venezuelan soldiers eventually paid a high price for this.”
The “Right Wing” Military

It would appear that most high school and college history teachers and professors are in league to make the study of history appear about as exciting as waiting for water to boil. They teach it as a spattering of dates, places, names, and events; as if history were random chaos and meaningless occurrences. Other educators seem intent on teaching history as an endless litany of crimes against humanity committed by the United States and her European forebears. Underlying this approach is a hatred for Christianity, which is usually obfuscated by identifying her in racial terms.

However, properly taught, history highlights the plan of a sovereign God for the human race. This approach, in turn, helps us appreciate our own constitutional heritage and compares it with how other forms of government have or have not worked, and why. History also helps us understand the intent of those who lived and acted before us, including the fruits they produced, which are often not seen till long after they have departed. For example, this blog has already noted (and will continue to note, as occasion demands) the role that Simón Bolívar has played in our current travails. The impact of one man, for good or ill, will long outlive him.

When it comes to Communism in Venezuela and in Cuba, one has to go back in history at least to the French Revolution and its virulent anti-Christian fervor — which fervor actually begins in the Garden of Eden: “Ye shall be as gods”. Lenin was a devoted student of the French Revolution as witness 130 years later when he said that the Jacobins ceased the terror too soon, “We will not repeat that error.”

The 19th Century revolutions which convulsed South America and the Caribbean were children of the 18th Century French Revolution. And both bore like fruit: mass executions, unspeakable tortures, unimagined repression, and seas of blood. And those pandemoniums spawned revolutionary, hate-filled descendants who became active in the early 20th century and are with us to this day.

One of the most influential Communists who predated the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was Paul Lafargue, born in Cuba in 1842. Although he lived most of his life in France, he spent time in London where he frequently visited Karl Marx and married the latter’s daughter, Jenny. In France husband and wife were tireless in their propagation of the Communist faith. They committed suicide jointly (“hypodermic of cyanid acid”) in 1911. The suicide note ended with, “Long live Communism! Long live the international socialism!”

One of the speakers at their funeral was Vladimir Lenin who later told his wife, “If one cannot work for the Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the Lafargues.” The utter, cold, atheistic pitilessness of the adherents to this faith must never be minimized, let alone ignored. For stomach turning evidence of the practical, real life manifestations of their theories, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, would be a good place to start.

As for the founder’s life, Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals is a must read. Michael Bakunin, an extreme ideologue who was not so blind as to understand what he saw in Marx, wrote, “He does not believe in God but he believed much in himself and makes everyone serve himself. His heart is not full of love but of bitterness and he has very little sympathy for the human race.”

That describes the man to whose theories the Cuban Paul Lafargue devoted his life, never pausing to care that such a man’s fruits cannot possibly be good. On the contrary the Lafargue’s were very successful in promoting Communism in France and in Spain. And their fruit was the propagation and exportation of Marxist ideology across the Atlantic to Venezuela and Cuba.

In Venezuela, among the first Communists was Gustavo Machado, born in 1898; a man of action who dedicated his life to spreading the faith throughout the Caribbean. Machado blindly believed Marx’s aphorism, “Violence is the midwife of history.”

On the other side of the globe, the newly minted Comintern, created by the Soviet Union to promote Communist revolution globally, assigned Fabio Grobart to do just that in Mexico, Venezuela, and Cuba. “The first two countries had petroleum. Cuba occupied a strategically political geographical position in the Caribbean from which shipments to the United States could be controlled.”

Grobart arrived in Havana in 1922 and played a critical role in the development of the alien philosophy in Cuba. He arrived disguised as a poor tailor, a war refugee, and surreptitiously began recruiting university students amenable to leftist blandishments. In one of his first reports to the Comintern, Grobart affirmed that “objective conditions” existed in Cuba for a revolution, given the fall in sugar prices after the war and, most importantly, an easily provoked anti U.S. attitude among some university young people because of the Platt Amendment. He eventually worked with three of these, Julio Mella, Antonio Guiteras, and Enrique Lister, along with Venezuelan, Gustavo Machado, to found the Cuban Communist Party.

Decades later, Grobart discovered and mentored a young Fidel Castro.

Venezuela would have to wait a few years, since General Gómez understood the dangers of Communism and opposed it with an iron fist which the early agents had not been able to avoid. However, Gustavo Machado studied in France where he helped found the French Communist Party. He then moved to Cuba where he taught Julio Mella among many others. In 1926 he moved to Mexico as Cuba’s regime was onto the Communist threat. Machado also took his virus to Nicaragua where he collaborated with Augusto César Sandino, for whom the Nicaraguan Communists are named (Sandinistas).

Julio Mella was assassinated in Mexico by Communist Italian, Vitorrio Vidali, who also assassinated Trotsky. Antonio Guiteras was ambushed and killed by the Cuban army. Enrique Lister kept the faith till he met his reward in 1994 in Spain. Fabio Grobart also died in Cuba in 1994, advising Fidel Castro till the very end. Gustavo Machado died in Venezuela in 1983, having also participated in the founding of the Communist Party of Venezuela. Vittorio Vidali, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy, eventually returned to Trieste and remained there as leader of the Communist Party after it was annexed to Italy. He was a member of Italy’s parliament.

(Fidel Castro’s bald-faced opportunism is seen in how he refers to Mella as a “martyr” to the revolution, fully confident that very few know he was actually killed by another Communist.)

The shadows of these men are long in the Americas. Some might consider that to mean we are close to sundown. I prefer to think in terms of a new dawn. But for that to be so, we must seek to better understand.

Headline 3 days after their deaths, “How Mr. and Mrs. Paul Lafargue Committed Suicide”

The “Right Wing” Military

February 25, 2022February 25, 2022 Richard Barnes

Growing up, a standard assumption was that “the military” — whether that of the United States or that of Venezuela — was “right wing”. So ingrained was that assumption that when Hugo Chávez appeared on television on February 4, 1993, announcing that his coup attempt had failed “por ahora“, we assumed he and his comrades had intended to re-impose a Pérez Jiménez dictatorship on the country.

No one paused to consider his words nor his co-conspirators — all, without exception, men of the Left. No one paused to question the previous night’s role of Nicolás Maduro, trained in Castro’s Cuba and recently reintegrated into Venezuela.

Our paradigm was Seven Days in May, both the novel and the movie: any military uprising has to be from the “right”, à la Augusto Pinochet. (So strong was that paradigm that we didn’t ask ourselves whether the Chinese or Soviet armies were also “right wing”.)

In 1978, during a trip to Venezuela, while visiting friends whom I had known since infancy, conversations inevitably cascaded to the massive construction and manufacturing projects in the country, in particular the Ciudad Guayana area. My concerns about the massive “nationalizations” (expropriations) that had taken place and the control of the oil and iron ore industries — both the properties and the management — were met with assurances that these actions, although admittedly concerning, would not lead to a Socialistic or Communistic environment.

Seeing my doubts about their readiness to ascribe good intentions to the politicians drunk with power and riches, my friends clinched the argument by stating the obvious: “Ricky, don’t worry, if things take a turn to Communism, the military will not allow it. They will step in and put a stop to it.”

They had a point. We all agreed the military tended to be conservative. After all, Pinochet put a stop to the Communist depredations in Chile and by 1978, Chile’s GNP growth was in the double digits after the negative GNP swamps of the Allende era. Chile would go on to lead South America in both economic and personal liberties until recent years when they began flirting again with the totalitarian Zeitgeist.

So, it is easy to understand why Venezuelans felt somewhat secure in assuming their military had their back.

However, that does not excuse us. A little scratching beneath the surface ought to have awakened us to the fact — incontrovertible by now — that Venezuela’s military leadership was a hotbed of Communist infiltrators, with direct connections to Fidel Castro. Did we not consider it strange that the very first official state visit by Fidel Castro after the January 1, 1959, coup against Batista was to Venezuela a mere 22 days later?

Did we not have strong reasons to credit the rumors — now corroborated as facts — that the Venezuelan army had surreptitiously and illegally supplied United States war materiel to Castro’s guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra? Did we not wonder how it was that Vice-Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal had so freely, with unmitigated audacity, invited Dictator Castro to Venezuela to celebrate the first anniversary of the coup against Pérez Jiménez (see Larrazabal)?

Where was the Venezuelan army when Communist-instigated “students” violently attacked a sitting vice-president of the United States and his wife when they came to the country on a state visit (see Nixon). For decades, the beautiful people instructed the rest of us to ignore Nixon’s assertion that Communists, a loud minority, had orchestrated this embarrassment. However, since the election of Chávez in 1999, the truth of Nixon’s statements was no longer denied and was now openly celebrated.

So, my good friends and I were without excuse: the Venezuelan Army could not be relied upon to protect the country from a Communist takeover because its leadership was too compromised. And many decent Venezuelan soldiers eventually paid a high price for this.

But it took decades to see this. President Carlos Andrés Pérez thought highly of Fidel Castro, actually meeting with him secretly during his first tenure (1974 – 1979 — the age of expropriations), and inviting him to his second tenure’s (1989 – 1993) inauguration. It was during that inauguration that Pérez naively gave Castro carte blanche to enter the country with hundreds of “advisors”, by-passing immigration. He also gave the Cubans full use of the Eurobuilding Hotel, then in final phases of construction, in Caracas. No Venezuelan was allowed in the building, only Cubans, including food and cleaning services.

It was during this infiltration that Nicolás Maduro returned to Venezuela camouflaged as a Cuban adviser. And, just as ominously, scores of fully equipped sharpshooters entered also. Upon departure, Venezuelan emigration officials reported to President Pérez that the number of Cubans and equipage departing was significantly less than what had entered. The president waved aside their concerns. Much later, Venezuelan intelligence (before its complete replacement by Castro’s Communists) confirmed that the weapons had been stashed for years in the Caracas metro, under Maduro’s hooded eyes.

Before closing this post, I do want to preview that during the coup attempt in 1993, President Pérez, swearing he would not commit suicide like Allende, acted with great courage and audacity, fully armed and fighting his way out of La Casona to Miraflores where he was shortly surrounded once again, forcing him to fight his way out a second time that night. Pérez was naive and foolish in his childish embrace of a rattlesnake like Castro, but when the chips were down, he acted valiantly. We are not cardboard creatures.

The above may read like an outline or a pitch for a political or crime thriller, but it is all true and factual. As we continue to review the rise of Chávez, we will get into some detail. For now, let it be said that one must never assume anything, including that the military, whether that of Venezuela or that of the United States, is “right wing”. Everything rises and falls on leadership. Instead of assuming, one must observe and analyze the leadership and its decisions and policies.

Dictator Nicolás Maduro, the world’s living testament to the wisdom of Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5

General Augusto Pinochet, circa 1973. Notable quote which distills why he is hated, even 16 years after his death: “Everything I did, all my actions, all of the problems I had I dedicate to God and to Chile, because I kept Chile from becoming Communist.”

President Carlos Andrés Pérez, circa 1973, campaigning for his first tenure in office

Venezuelan Vice Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal and Fidel Castro, Caracas, 1959

President Carlos Andrés Pérez, Dictator Fidel Castro, and President Felipe González (Spain), 1990. By then, Pérez had been warned repeatedly that Castro had been conspiring with military leaders to overthrow him, including by means of assassination. Pérez impatiently dismissed these reports. He changed his mind during the 1993 coup attempt when he came within a whisker of losing his life.

Chávez Rode the Cult of Bolivar

February 10, 2022February 10, 2022 Richard Barnes

“Nowhere was this cult more apparent and abundant than in the armed forces who were taught to consider themselves the heirs of the Libertador.” (Bolivar’s Endiosamiento)

If you were to visit the tombs of past Venezuelan dictators, all anti-Communist men, kneel and put your ear to the ground. You will hear their spinning.

Their hagiography of Bolivar was used by men such as Douglas Bravo to enable the infiltration of the Venezuelan armed forces with men committed to the Bolivar mystique, under which they indoctrinated and recruited men who would readily obey orders to impose a Communist dictatorship.

Douglas Bravo understood the veneration that Venezuelans had for Bolivar. He used the image of Bolivar as a lure. He knew that the meaning of “Bolivarianism”, as preached and indoctrinated by infiltrators like Chávez, meant, to the minds of the soldiers, nationalism and anti-imperialism. And, importantly, the anti-imperialism was focused on the United States and the United States alone.

As “Bolivarianism” continued to be inculcated in the Armed Forces, it denied it had anything to do with Marxist theory and that it was only a description of the Libertador‘s dream of a united South America, free of the clutches of the dreaded yanquis, and focused on the prosperity and freedoms of the Venezuelan peoples.

So, Bravo and his acolytes acted like offended damsels whenever anyone asserted that their preaching sounded Marxist or Communist. Their usual riposte was that they were nationalists, meaning that they rejected all internationalism — which, of course, meant that they rejected Communist internationalism.

Which of course was a lie.

As a child, I would hear — remember, this was a time of children-can-be-seen-but-not-heard — adults express concerns about university student diatribes against the United States while loudly professing their love for Venezuela. To these adults, something sounded off key in the protestations. It was all-too-clear that the supposed love for Venezuela was drowned by their hatred towards the United States.

Why the hatred?

When asked one on one, the rioters would deny they hated Americans; however, at the mitínes (rallies), the hatred was palpable. Why?

The facile answers taught by American college professors and other usual suspects, did not hold water: Monroe Doctrine backlash, imperialist America, uninvited American missionary activities, Ugly American tourists, and more.

When I was about 13 or 14 a childhood friend visited the United States for the first time, accompanying her family on a long-expected vacation. On her return, she reported to us how she purposefully dropped trash in American parks and “I was not arrested, and no policeman saw me”.

What causes someone to hate another country so much that upon her first visit to said country — a country she had never travelled to before — she would throw trash and brag about getting away with it?

“Monroe Doctrine” backlash doesn’t cut it.

After the riots and violent attacks on Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife in 1958 (see Nixon), the United States National Security Council’s minutes recorded comments by John Foster Dulles:

“Secretary Dulles went on to say that there was one more very important factor in the Latin American problem which the United States faced. This was the collapse of religion generally in Latin America. We all believe in this country that religion, with its emphasis on the rights and freedoms of the individual under God, is the very core of our democratic system and that it is also the greatest bulwark against atheistic communism. Unhappily … organized religion had practically no influence on the mass of the people as opposed to the aristocracy. Admittedly, said Secretary Dulles, he did not know what we could do about correcting this very grave situation, but it was certainly at the heart of our problem in Latin America.“

I doubt anyone can imagine a member of today’s National Security Council, or any major college faculty lounge or school board, expressing thoughts remotely similar to those of Secretary Dulles. Even back in the 50s it was becoming somewhat rare albeit not surprising.

And that, in my opinion, helps explain the hatred.

The United States has long been identified with Christianity. Such identification is offensive, even to many Christians today. It may have been abused by some, but it cannot be honestly denied. From Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century and his marvel at the faithful church attendance of Americans and their reliance on their faith, themselves, and volunteer organizations, as opposed to reliance on the State, to an executive from Argentina, whom I had the privilege of entertaining when he visited Texas in the mid 90s, and hearing him express wonderment at seeing “so many churches! Practically one on every corner!”, the Christian influence on the United States is undeniable.

This is not to say that such Christianity has been watered down if not fully apostatized, but it is to say that our history has been greatly impacted by such, and such influence is readily discernible should one decide to look at primary sources — Mayflower Compact, Bradford’s journal, the constitutions of the 13 colonies, sermons from America’s founding era, letters and speeches by America’s founders, missionary activity, and more.

The maniacal, bitter hatred that Communism has against Christianity is real. This is blatantly reflected in The Communist Manifesto which frontally, unabashedly, and bitterly attacks the Christian faith: “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.“

And so, Douglas Bravo infiltrated the Venezuelan armed forces with Communists (others did the same with the universities) but ordered them to never mention Communism, only “nationalism and hatred of the yanquis“. The hatred of the yanquis was said to be because of their imperialism, but upon closer examination it was a proxy for Christianity.

(The identification of the United States with Christianity does not at all mean that my position is that America is a “Christian nation” or that we are the chosen people. Those are straw men about which too much ink has been needlessly spilled while we continue down our road of denying our history and embracing those who genuinely hate us and mean us ill.)

The rise of Chávez was not an overnight thing. Other Communist infiltrators in key positions enabled him to be promoted despite pedestrian academic achievements and even betrayals resulting in deaths of Venezuelan soldiers. The rise was long term, methodical, and successful.

We will be writing more about this.

A first edition of Tocqueville’s *Democracy In America* (published 1835 and 1840)

Chavez in grade school, military academy, and as a paratrooper in 1992, year of his failed military coup attempt

Douglas Bravo (center) with Venezuelan guerillas, circa 1960. Bravo’s dates are 1932 – 2021. We will be saying more of him in due course.

First edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in German in 1848

Simon Bolivar’s Endiosamiento

January 29, 2022 Richard Barnes

Simon Bolivar was an enigma: heroic yet cruel; capable of stratospheric oratory yet acutely dishonorable (to put it mildly); extremely charismatic yet disloyal. To see prior posts about him, start here.

With such a flawed man, how is it that he was practically considered a god in Venezuela?

As he approached his final years, his luster had suffered greatly, given his openly carnal personal proclivities and, more alarmingly, his inclinations to tyranny. By the end of his life, he was little more than a repudiated dictator, having attempted to impose a centralized, totalitarian system on his Great Colombia. He died in Colombia in 1830 at the age of 47. A sketch of him shortly before his death reflects a man twice his age, the effects of tuberculosis but also of his dissolute actions.

His authoritarianism was so intensely rejected that the Venezuelan congress refused to approve the repatriation of his body to Venezuela, his place of birth.

However, twelve years later, General José Antonio Páez, who had betrayed Bolivar in leading a successful separation of Venezuela from Colombia (see Ranchitos III), began the intense process of resurrecting Bolivar for political purposes.

Páez requested the repatriation of Bolivar’s remains and, with much pomp, had him buried in the cathedral in Caracas. However, given the longevity of memories of people who had suffered much under Bolivar, more needed to be done later to divinize him.

In 1870, Guzmán Blanco initiated a systematic process to rehabilitate Bolivar’s image. Over Guzmán’s remaining years (he died in 1888) great public works were named after Bolivar, long-winded laudatory speeches extolled him with uninhibited exaggeration, and slowly but surely the former goat began to become the Great Libertador once more.

These rituals, motivated by political convenience, converted Bolivar into a sacred political military symbol, whose importance could not be underestimated.

Other political leaders continued this divinizing which, in many quarters, produced a cuasi religious cult to the dead hero. Nowhere was this cult more apparent and abundant than in the armed forces who were taught to consider themselves the heirs of the Libertador.

Fidel Castro and Douglas Bravo, a Venezuelan Communist whose ultimately successful strategy was to infiltrate the Venezuelan army (here), further converted Bolivar into a revolutionary saint. In fact, interestingly, it was Venezuela’s dictators who were most responsible for resurrecting Bolivar and elevating his memory to godlike status.

This could be done because it was not too difficult to take Bolivar’s heroic deeds and super-stratospheric writings and make him into a mythological figure, especially after several generations of hagiography by dictators who used him for blatantly self-serving political purposes. Juan Vicente Gómez, although greatly hated in some quarters, successfully pacified Venezuela and built roads still in use today. He ruled from 1908 to 1935, and built unnumbered plazas, buildings, and more, naming them after the Libertador.

Gómez died, fortuitously, on the anniversary of Bolivar’s death 105 years before. It is undeniable that Gómez had created an environment of stability that Venezuela had not seen since her separation from Spain over a century before. He did this while venerating Bolivar to an almost fanatical degree. For more on Gómez, see here.

Gómez legacy in infrastructure and consolidation of the country into one nation are undeniable, but those were not his greatest bequests. That honor belongs to his contribution to the rehabilitation of Simon Bolivar. Innumerable plazas, each one with a statue or bust of Bolivar, dotted the country and the cult of Bolivar became firmly established.

In addition, and portentously, Gómez, more than any other leader, professionalized the Venezuelan armed forces. Although ignored, Gómez, far more than Bolivar, was the creator of Venezuela’s soldier class. And he ensured that soldier class felt itself to be the heir to Simon Bolivar.

I was at a dinner in Venezuela early in the first decade of this century where, in the midst of a discussion about the direction of the country, a young lady spoke up, “Given all the adulation about Bolivar and how his name is being used as justification for the actions taken since the late 90s, I am having second thoughts about just how great that man really was….”

I’ve not been back to Venezuela since then. But I was left wondering whether the cultish hagiography is the same today as it was when I was young.

We’ll have more to say about this, given that Hugo Chávez rose to power as a “Bolivarian”. What is the meaning of that term? Why is it important to both Venezuela and the United States?

Bolivar as seen in innumerable plazas and city centers throughout Venezuela

Sketch of Bolivar made shortly before his death at age 47 in 1830.

Charlie’s Lament and Chironjas

January 18, 2022January 18, 2022 Richard Barnes

“I knew I wasn’t young any more, but it never came to me I’d gone so far down the hill. Long as a man’s young he can take trouble in stride. Time is with him no matter how bad a jam he’s in. Then one day it slaps him in the face. It’s not with him any more, it’s workin’ against him. His friends fall away . . . scattered, or dead, or just changed. His kids are grown up and gone from him. All the old principles that he anchored to, they’ve come a-loose; nobody’s payin’ attention to them any more. He’ an old grayheaded man livin’ in a young man’s world, and all his benchmarks are gone.” — Charlie Flagg in Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained

My youngest son and I had finally decided that the best way to reach and pick the chironjas (orangelos) was to extend the ladder as high as it would go, place it beneath the clusters of citrus, and reach up with the fully extended pruner pole. This required us to locate the ladder’s footing as best we could on the steep shoulder on the edge of the jungle precipice. The tree is one we had obviously neglected to have pruned over the years. Not only is it impossibly tall, but it grew on the edge of a steep bluff.

The chironja, a cross between an orange and a grapefruit, is thought to have originated in Puerto Rico. It is very juicy, can be eaten in sections, like grapefruit, or squeezed for drink, like oranges. It is popular in our household, especially at breakfast.

I climbed the ladder, intending to step onto the second to last step as I had done so many times heretofore. However, this time, especially as I raised the extended pole, I felt myself swaying just a bit, but “up there” that little bit was magnified into more than prudence would allow. So, I stepped down one level and harvested what I could, regretting that I could not do what I used to do.

Nevertheless, we figured it out and, between my sons and I, the chironjas will have been harvested in the next few days. Plus, the tree will be pruned, we now being in waning moon.

As I descended the ladder, I remembered having read in The Time It Never Rained, “Then one day it slaps him in the face”. The fact that time is not on your side can become very clear by means of an everyday action such as climbing a ladder. Those more wise among us know that time is really never on our side: we are encouraged from early age to “number our days”, and although most do not, yet in the lives of many, they do come to that point when reality becomes impossible to ignore.

A friend tells of the time he was “slapped in the face” as to his encroaching years. He was about to do something that he had “always done”. One day, he could not. He says it was an almost one-day-to-the-next thing. After the initial, momentary shock, he recognized that those particular days were over. And now it was up to him to make the remaining days — which can be many still! — count.

Beyond the physical activities that are naturally curtailed, there remain what Charlie Flagg called “the benchmarks”.

By God’s grace, those will remain, because the principles and ethics that are moored on Eternal Truth will outlive us all. My prayer is that they will endure in the lives of our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and on to a thousand generations. Our offspring will do the right thing in the end, “if they’ve been brought up in the proper way”.

After Charlie uttered his lament, Manuel, the boy, now a man, who came to respect and love Charlie, replied, “The good benchmarks are still there, Mister Charlie.”

Yes, the good benchmarks are still there, and they will be there till the end of time.