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Have We Been Had? Part 4: Another Look At Sweden

Richard Barnes

The last time we considered Sweden’s anomalous experience with the Covid Regimentation was over a year and a half ago, in August, 2021. 

As I stated in that post, “One country refused to bow down to the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and the Lockdown and Mask Professors (which are legion).

“That country is Sweden. For a refresher, see here. And for my reply to some pushback I got for my comments on Sweden [in 2020], see here.”

John Hinderaker, of Powerlline, published the below post, which we all should read. The Local article he quotes from is behind a paywall so if you wish to read more you’ll have to subscribe:

From John Hinderaker:

Sweden was an outlier during the covid epidemic, in that its government did not order a nationwide shutdown [nor mask wearing]. This policy did not please much of Sweden’s establishment, as represented by The Local, which has been pro-lockdown. So this Local article is notable, in that it recognizes a basic fact about covid mortality that should have been obvious all along:

At one point in May 2020, Sweden had the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, spurring newspapers like the New York Times and Time Magazine to present the country as a cautionary tale, a warning of how much more Covid-19 could ravage populations if strict enough measures were not applied.

That was very early in the epidemic, obviously. And country to country comparisons of covid-classified deaths are questionable:

Excess mortality — the number of people who die in a year compared to the number expected to die based on previous years — is seen by some statisticians as a better measure for comparing countries’ Covid-19 responses, as it is less vulnerable to differences in how Covid-19 deaths are reported.

Here in Minnesota, a guy who fell off a ladder and broke his neck was recorded as a covid death. Likewise a guy who had a car accident, was flung into a ditch, and died. And many others of that sort. Total mortality, on the other hand, is objectively measurable.

So there was undisguised glee among lockdown sceptics when Svenska Dagbladet published its data last week showing that in the pandemic years 2020, 2021 and 2022 Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest, not only in the European Union, but of all the Nordic countries, beating even global Covid-19 success stories, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland.

So if you forget about classifying covid deaths and look at how many people died in excess of demographic projections, Sweden’s results were the best in the European Union. How can that be? The answer is, or should have been, obvious:

So why, if the Covid-19 death rates are still so different, are the excess mortality rates so similar?

This largely reflects the fact that many of those who died in Sweden in the first year of the pandemic were elderly people in care homes who would have died anyway by the end of 2022.

About 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths were in people above 70, Aavitsland pointed out, adding that this is the same age group where you find around 80 percent of all deaths, regardless of cause, in a Scandinavian country.

“My interpretation is that in the first year of the pandemic, say March 2020 – February 2021, Sweden had several thousand excess deaths among the elderly, including nursing home residents,” he said. “Most of this was caused by Covid-19. In the other [Nordic] countries, more people like these survived, but they died in 2022. The other countries managed to delay some deaths, but now, three years after, we end up at around the same place.”

An important fact here is that people who died from covid were overwhelmingly not just old, but old and already sick. So covid tipped them over sooner than would otherwise have happened, but not by a lot.

The bottom line is a point I have made more than once: covid shutdowns, at best–i.e., not in states like New York and Minnesota where infected old people were sent into nursing homes–delayed the inevitable for some of the already-sick elderly, at great cost to the rest of us, and especially at appalling cost to young people. It was a terrible bargain.

The above post by Mr. Hinderaker is not surprising to many of us who strongly questioned the worldwide “Covid Regime”. However, contrary to The Local’s assertion, it gives us no “glee” to see the devastation unquestioning acquiescence to corrupt reasoning has caused.

Again, it is important to remember that the world’s “public health experts” estimated that, without coverings and curfews, Sweden would suffer 80,000 to 90,000 deaths by May, 2020. That is, before the summer of 2020, Sweden was to have experienced massive numbers of deaths, not to mention a crippled hospital network. 

That did NOT happen. So the “experts” then moved the goal posts and began to assert that Sweden’s death rate was higher than that of her immediate neighbors.

“But, of course, curfews were not imposed upon the world because of ‘death rates’ [or “number of cases”] but rather because of absolute numbers of death. Numbers which never came close to materializing. Regardless, her death rate was lower than those of countries (and some U.S. states) who did exactly what the “public health experts” told them to do. And, what’s more, around June of 2020, her neighbors, Finland and Norway, actually reverted to very laissez faire approaches as well. In other words, their approaches emulated Sweden’s. And their approaches resulted in lower death rates. So, the experts’ and media’s comparisons to her neighbors left out the fact that her neighbors’ also had a “light touch” response to the plague. I know, I know: we are all shocked (!) that the reporting was misleading.”

“If you relied only on the usual media to keep informed, you would think the unified intelligent world was in agreement and that only quacks and idiots differed. You would not know that an entire developed European country was among the refuseniks.”

My conclusion back in 2021 applies today even more forcefully:

“Government Central Planning will have even less success in controlling a virus than it has had controlling the economies of the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela.

“A virus will virus. Central Planning will only exacerbate its effects. 

“But, as we have seen, and will continue to see, the temptation for man to play God and to control the lives of others is overwhelming. It was so in Eden (“ye shall be as gods”) and it will be so until the end of time.”

Lest we forget: Sweden vs. New York mortality in 2020. Both ended up at about the same. However, the trajectory of each presents a grotesque contrast. New York’s mandates were draconian. So were her results.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top epidemiologist who withstood unrelenting, withering criticism while staying the course

https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/accelerated-urgent-care-doctors-recommend-lifting-shelter-in-place-order

This briefing to local California media took place almost three years ago, in April, 2020. After 5 million views, it was taken down, a practice that has since become all-too-common. However, the news station still has it up. Both videos are available as of this writing and well worth your time because they so clearly reflect what many knew even back then but were censored from saying so. The first is roughly 51 minutes, the second, 2 minutes.

Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index

Richard Barnes

In the mid 1980s I had the privilege of working with the Gideon’s organization. Every Saturday, rain snow or shine, a group of us would meet for breakfast in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, to review assignments and plan the upcoming weeks. Although our conversations covered just about everything under the sun, I’d often hear these men, all of whom were older than I, express gratitude for God, family, and country. In that order.

However, they were also realistic enough to gently tamp down my younger-man’s exuberance about America. In my naiveté I still believed that, if one would scratch beneath the surface across the country, one would tap into a vast reservoir of appreciation for our roots, both colonial and early republic. By that I meant, surely, the great majority of Americans understood that the truths we regard as “self-evident” are so because of the religious tradition undergirding our beliefs and our very lives and that to reject that heritage would lead to tyranny and ruin. 

My colleagues would point to Scripture, which has plenty of examples of nations whose names now gather dust in forgotten manuscripts and unvisited libraries. Nations that knew the Triune God but did not honor him. The words of Daniel to Belshazzar come to mind. Even the nation of Israel was judged for her betrayal. Sadly, it is the nature of men and women to forget, to deny, to dishonor.

John Stuart Mill, the great relativistic thinker, assumed that Christian ethics are permanent and hence we can take them for granted. He provides yet another example proving that “great thinkers” are not often wise.

I recalled my friends from Kalamazoo when I read the 2022 Transparency International Corruptions Perceptions Index comments on Venezuela.

Venezuela’s foundations differed widely from colonial and early republic America. However, she did have a basis for understanding the source of her prosperity in the first half of the 20th Century, a time when she enjoyed high levels of economic freedom which produced an environment of numberless voluntary transactions and unprecedented years of well-being with high growth rates. In 1960, Venezuela’s per capita income, at 45% of the US per capita income, was the highest in South America while her growth rate was higher than even Germany’s. 

Her great economic success fueled the transition to democracy in 1959. However, her democratically elected officials immediately began to curtail her economic freedoms in favor of Socialistic policies which eventually led to contractions and, by the end of the century, ushered in an authoritarian Socialist regime that, like a protean, angry octopus, has its tentacles in every nook and cranny of Venezuelan’s lives. By 2013, even the Carter Center, albeit belatedly, acknowledged the Venezuelan “elections” to be a sham (my word, not theirs; I don’t have to be diplomatic). By then the damage was done and the fix was in, and continues to be in, to this day.

Oh, but there’s more.

Transparency International’s 2022 report ranks Venezuela as the most corrupt country in the Americas. That’s “most corrupt”, as in more corrupt than Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Her rulers are reliably accused of leading massive drug cartels and having extensive ties to major international criminal organizations. Incredibly, illegal businesses account for 21% of Venezuela’s GDP. And her mining, especially gold and diamonds, are controlled by criminal groups who, with impunity, extort, enslave, prostitute, and murder the inhabitants, mostly defenseless indigenous peoples. 

In other words, Socialists are grossly guilty of what they delight in accusing Capitalists and Christians (they purposefully interchange the two).

In my youth, I would often hear the older generation’s assurances that Venezuela would not go the way of Cuba or Allende’s Chile. That she understood very well that liberty created her prosperity. As for her dalliances with Socialistic policies since 1960, those were very limited and did were not slippery slopes. I wanted to believe such assurances, even though my own family history said otherwise. Cuba, where my father was born, was also an economic miracle which went the way of all flesh practically overnight. At the time I did not know enough to ask my elders what made Venezuela any different; what would keep her from doing likewise.

And I certainly was not aware of Venezuela’s deeply infiltrated military, in cahoots with Castro and determined to rule Venezuela in Communist fashion, tyranny and all.

Venezuela “understood” where her prosperity came from. However, she ditched it nonetheless. 

The United States appears to be doing the same, with even less excuse.

Mourning the death of a child. In addition to the griefs which are the common lot of all, these peoples have been abused, murdered, displaced, and enslaved. Countless have fled to unknown destinies in Brazil.

Mother and children in Brazil after fleeing criminal attacks in Venezuela’s mining arc.

Plaza Colon in Caracas, Venezuela, circa 1950

Caracas boy, circa 1950

The Unquiet Death of Peter Fechter

Richard Barnes

Most of us are not given to much self-analysis, but if I were to be asked what marked or set the long-lasting or permanent influences or directions for my life, I’d likely join millions in crediting my detestation of godless totalitarian regimes and philosophies. Of course, each of those millions came to his or her position via different paths.

In my case, my father’s unwavering condemnation of Communism — whether of the European, Asian, Latin American, or the American intellectual varieties made no difference to him — undoubtedly set my gut-level course far earlier than that of my heart and mind, which explained to me the religious basis for such a system and the importance of the historic Faith in defending and strengthening the liberties we have enjoyed.

For instance, as an elementary school pupil in El Pao, I instinctively questioned why the Weekly Reader, so popular in schools across the country, would seemingly tip toe around America’s role in the Cold War, such as its purporting to explain that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) actually made sense. It didn’t to us, but what did we know? We just wanted to win the Cold War over the Communists. We had to wait several more decades for that victory to be accomplished, albeit not in American faculties.

And then there was the Berlin Wall erected in 1961. After President John F. Kennedy’s inaction and failure to provide the agreed-upon backup in the Bay of Pigs operation, surely he’d act to stop this inhumane attempt to physically divide peoples in Europe, no?

Not even a peep from his administration.

Then, on August 17, 1962, close to the first anniversary of the wall, the utter cruelty, pitilessness, and godlessness of Communist philosophy and politics were laid bare yet again for the world to see and ponder.

In the early afternoon, two teenagers attempting to flee Communist oppression in East Berlin, ran towards the wall not far from Checkpoint Charlie. One clambered to the top as gun fire rained on them, yet stopped to look back for his friend who seemed stuck, unable to move. “Run! Come here!” he screamed, but his companion fell back to the “death strip” on the East Berlin side. Seeing this, the first boy jumped to the West, landing safely.

The border troop files later revealed that the two fugitives were shot at without warning. Four border guards fired at least 35 shots. Peter Fechter was hit as he jumped up onto the wall and fell backwards, leaning against the wall for support. Instead of arresting the defenseless young man, the guards took up new positions and continued firing until he collapsed to the ground.

Gravely wounded, he calmly, but loudly, pled for help, as East Berlin soldiers kept their rifles aimed at him, but did nothing to assist him. On the West Berlin side, American GI’s also remained impassive, doing nothing, one actually saying, “It’s not our problem.”

The wall cut right through the heart of what had once been a vibrant Berlin neighborhood, separating friends and family, in some cases for decades to come. One thing atheistic philosophies are known for is their contempt for anything outside the state. That would include church and volunteer associations; but most importantly, the family. Anything that weakens or divides the home is pursued with gusto, including incentives for family members to report on one another to the state.

So physically dividing a neighborhood is small potatoes for such regimes.

As Peter Fechter twisted in agony and called for help, men, women, and children on either side of the wall watched in horror from their apartments. There is one photograph of an elderly lady, covering her mouth with her hand as she beheld in dismay, unable to help.

His screams eventually ceased after 50 long minutes. Finally East German border troops carried him away and later pronounced him dead.

Pictures had been taken by western photographers and shown around the world, turning his death into a symbol of Communist inhumanity, thereby presenting a ticklish situation to all right thinkers and spineless or bought politicians.

The regime’s chief propagandist’s words should send chills down the spines of anyone alive the past three years of mandated lockdowns and faux medical mandates: “[This event] was good for and in the interest of the state…. The life of each one of our brave young men in uniform is more important to us than the life of a lawbreaker. By staying away from our state border — blood, tears, and screams can be avoided.”

Yes, to avoid unpleasantries, simply bow down and submit.

For decades thereafter, the young man’s family was subjected to state-sponsored harassment, which ended only after the defeat of East European Communism. His sister, Ruth, expressed herself through her attorneys to no longer “be damned by passivity and inactivity.” She told how the family had felt powerless to act against the public denunciations instigated by the state.

One of the more dastardly characters of the “Cold War”, Willy Brandt, was then mayor of Berlin. He called for “calm and prudence”. Even as a child, I felt negatively toward that man. And that sense only intensified as I matured and saw that he always took the Soviet line, no matter what the provocation. 

Brandt resigned in 1974 when it was discovered that his close aide was an agent of the Stasi. When the wall fell, no one in authority called for the prosecution of the brutal and pitiless Erick Honecker, dictator of East Germany. Could it be they took seriously his threat to reveal “interesting interlocks” with the former West Germany’s political class, including Brandt, should he be prosecuted (cf Judgment In Moscow, Vladimir Bukovsky)?

But we did not act honorably either. American City Commandant, Albert Watson, ordered all our men to “stay on our side!” He then called John F. Kennedy’s White House to ask for direction. Kennedy was in California at the moment and was called, “Mr. President, an escapee is bleeding to death at the Berlin Wall.” But no answer was forthcoming. Hours later, Watson called again to say, “The matter has resolved itself.”

For the first time since the war, the call “Ami, go home!” was heard. A sign with the words, “Protecting forces? Murder condoners = accessories to murder” was seen at demonstrations. Cars drove back and forth outside the US Mission gates, honking in protest. When a US patrol was harassed by a passerby, the military dispersed the crowd using M14 rifles with mounted bayonets.

US politicians and media were also unsympathetic, calling the protesting Berliners a “mob”. The US State Department refused to rule out military force against the protests in West Berlin, without a peep of dissent by her mayor, Willie Brandt.

Western European newspapers tended to be more realistic, with one article declaring, “In Communist systems, it’s a good thing to shoot citizens who harbor the wish of escaping from the system.”

As with the Bay of Pigs matter in April, 1961, then the initiation of the Berlin Wall construction in August, 1961, Kennedy, also did nothing in the face of the cold blooded murder of Peter Fechter in August of 1962. Such timidity led to the “Cuban Missile Crisis a mere two months later, in October, 1962.

Peter Fechter was not an “activist”. He was a bricklayer who was close to his family and was used to visiting his sister and her loved ones in West Berlin. When the wall went up and the totalitarian character of Communist East Berlin no longer had the escape valve to the West, he and his friend decided to escape. They simply said in their hearts, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

This post concludes with the words of Peter Fechter’s sister: 

“My parents were broken by [his murder]. My father died young, in 1968, at the age of just 63. He couldn’t get over the death of his son. My mother went to the cemetery every day after the funeral. That was her home. At first, she was always observed by Stasi people during her visits. By the next day, freshly planted flowers had been ripped out or were gone. My mother couldn’t get her head around the fall of the wall. She always said, ‘We just drive to the West and no one shoots, but they killed Peter for it.’ My mother died at the age of 76 in 1991.”

Peter Fechter (1944-1962)

Peter Fechter pleaded for help for 50 minutes. In great pain he finally bled to death in agony before the Communists “rescued” his cadaver.

August 18, 1962. This photo of President John F. Kennedy at a California beach was published in newspapers around the world as West Berliners protested US inaction as Peter Flechter, in great pain, pleaded for help.

Apprehensive East German soldier helps a young boy who had been separated from his family pass through, in 1961. The soldier was seen by his superior and dismissed. Germans affirm that he was shot, although nothing was officially heard from or about him since that day. The wall (obstructions) went up overnight with strict orders to not let anyone pass.

Miami Visit

Richard Barnes

I came to Miami for Cousin Louis’s memorial service to be held Saturday, February 11, at Shake-a-Leg in Coconut Grove. Louis volunteered at Shake-a-Leg, a charitable organization which uses the marine and waters sports environment to encourage and help folks with disabilities.

It had been a while since my last visit to the area so it is good to have a bit of time in which to touch base with friends I’d not seen in close to two decades and also with family.

My grandfather, Max A. Barnes, left Cuba in the late 40s after retiring from Bethlehem Steel. Once, way too late in life, I asked Aunt Sarah what made Grandfather Max leave Cuba when Castro was still over a decade away and come to Miami. She replied, “He saw what was coming. And Miami was tropical, like Cuba.”

Readers of this blog can fully understand my aunt’s reply addressing my grandfather’s concerns, but I did not, until much later when I began looking into Latin America’s revolutionary history, including Fidel Castro’s activities in the very 40s and thereafter. Obviously, Grandfather Max was paying attention. 

And that began a connection with Miami and South Florida that has endured through several generations.

Wednesday, the 8th, my old classmate, Dr. Niberto Moreno, treated me to lunch at the Riviera Country Club in Coral Gables. He called a classmate, Ken Barr, I’d not spoken with in over 50 years. It is very special to renew old  acquaintances. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo. Niberto and I still remember the first time we met as young boys in Miami Christian School, “¿Eres de Venezuela?” he asked me, stopping on the walkway and turning to me as I walked behind him to another class. I caught up with him and we talked and became friends ever since. Talking over lunch was as if we’d never parted.

Ken Barr had a great sense of humor. When I told him that over the phone, he inadvertently proved the point when he remarked, “That’s probably all I was good at: not studying but making people laugh!” No. He was a good student with great wit, which not too many possess. I have been blessed with good friends.

Thursday another friend, César López, from the Upjohn Puerto Rico days picked me up to have breakfast at CocoWalk, an open mall with good eateries. César has had tough battles with The Big C (cancer) but his optimism and sense of humor and faith have held him in good stead. It is a marvel to see him so well, although we both know one is never out of the woods in this situation; so he does his best to care for himself.

I don’t think he’ll mind my sharing one story I had forgotten about. He had brought his then six-month-old daughter, Penelope, to visit his mother in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico. It was a joyous reunion. The following morning he sat at the kitchen table talking with his mother as she cooked breakfast. Suddenly, she fell back into César’s arms and died of a brain hemorrhage. There are some things that remain indelibly stamped onto one’s  psyche. It was good to have reconnected with César. And I remembered to take a photo.

Later, I met my cousins Janis, Pete, and Vivian, at Shake-a-Leg in Coconut Grove. We drove around in circles looking for a diner that likely no longer exists. We must have seemed highly suspicious characters to a news crew that saw us drive by at least four times. Finally opted for a Cuban restaurant nearby where Vivian kindly treated us all. What a quiet, wonderful time of fellowship and gratitude! We all recognized that what we had growing up was unique.

Being relatively close to Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery (now Caballero Rivero Woodlawn North Park Cemetery and Mausoleum), I visited my paternal grandparents’s gravesite. Woodlawn is one of the oldest cemeteries in Miami. Much history lies there. For example, the park holds the tomb of Desiderio Arnaz II, Desi Arnaz’s father, who was the youngest mayor of Santiago, Cuba, was exiled in 1933, and died in Miami in 1973. Also, Alfonso, Prince of Asturias, a hemophiliac, died in Miami in 1938 as a result of internal bleeding after a car accident and was buried in Woodlawn but was re-entombed in Spain in 1985. And many more such.

Peafowl (peacocks and peahen) appeared in Coconut Grove in the early 20th Century. They are native to India. Residents have a love-hate relationship with them: beautiful, loud, leave lots of scratches and guano on cars. Ironically, the Peacock family were among the earliest settlers in the area in the 1870s. They opened a hotel in what is now the site of Peacock Park. This was many years before peafowl began to appear.

Finally, Coconut Grove has many old trees, including the Kapok Tree (Ceiba Pentandra) in a quiet corner dwarfing everything around it.

This area is very much a part of my childhood and I am grateful.

César López and I have breakfast

Cousins Janis and Pete Colón, Vivian Edwards, and I enjoy good conversation over lunch

Desi Arnaz’s parents: Desiderio Arnaz II (1894-1973) and Dolores Acha Socias (1896-1988)

Alfonso, Prince of Asturias (1907-1938)

From left: Max A. Barnes (1874-1950), Eustaquia R. Barnes (1893-1951), Alfred L. Barnes (1927-1968), and Sarah L. Rodriguez (1924-2015)

With a peacock friend

Kapok tree in a Coconut Grove neighborhood

Castro In Venezuela In 1989

Richard Barnes

In my research on the Cuba-Venezuela Nexus I read about a remarkable photograph taken when Fidel Castro arrived at the Teresa Carreño theater to participate in the festivities celebrating the inauguration of the second (non consecutive) term of Carlos Andrés Pérez (CAP), on February 2, 1989.

CAP thought highly of Fidel Castro, actually meeting with him secretly multiple times during his first tenure (1974-1979) which was, not coincidentally, the age of massive expropriations in Venezuela. CAP invited the bitter dictator to the inauguration for his second term (1989-1993). 

Bitter because he had an almost lifelong compulsive lust to use Venezuela’s riches to fund his Napoleonic dream of ruling over all of Latin America. A Spanish empire redivivus of sorts, only with lots more executions. He never lost that dream and when President Rómulo Betancourt spurned him he became inflamed with anger and took reckless actions to topple the elected president.

Fast forward to February 2, 1989, when the photo below was taken.

We cannot read another person’s mind. But in looking at this photo, you can! You can, because we now know what was going on in his mind at that moment.

CAP had naively given Castro carte blanche to enter the country with hundreds of “advisors”, by-passing immigration. This was unprecedented … and ominous. CAP also gave the Cubans full use of the Eurobuilding Hotel, then in final phases of construction, in Caracas. During Castro’s visit no Venezuelan was allowed in the sprawling premises, only Cubans, including food and cleaning services.

It was during that 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 CAP that the number of Cubans and equipage departing was significantly less than what had entered. 

The president waved aside their concerns. Later, after the 9-day Caracazo (February 27 – March 8, 1989) which by some estimates killed over 1,000 Venezuelans, the usual suspects reported this rioting as “spontaneous” reactions to CAP’s economic policies. There was nothing “spontaneous” about it. The playbook was a reboot of the April 9, 1948 Bogotazo whose aftermath is what Castro wanted for Venezuela. He eventually got what he wanted.

What was the context of the much ballyhooed discontent supposedly suffocating Venezuelans in the 70s and 80s which led to a massive popular uprising which brought a Communist, Hugo Chávez, to power, never to be relinquished?

Between 1973 and 1982, when conspiracies, mostly within Venezuela’s left-wing military leadership, had sworn to do away with “democracy”, Venezuela “was a country whose economy had grown 50% in a decade … and found herself among the 20 top economies in the planet and in the top 10 with the best quality of life. Unemployment was 3.2% and poverty had fallen from 14.4% in 1976 to 9.5% in 1979 … the index of absolute privation was .53%, the lowest percentage of the entire American continent along with Canada and 90% of Europe.” (Source: Thays Peñalver)

Democracy in Venezuela was not ended because of poverty or privation which has been argued or asserted since the late 1980s. She eschewed her democratic institutions according to the designs of leftwing ideologues mostly ensconced in the Venezuela military.

Nor was Venezuela hopelessly in hock to American companies and interests. CAP was ardently anti-US and his policies left no room for doubt. His administration nationalized the oil and iron ore industries, and greatly regulated the American companies operating in the country. Unprecedented actions, all, which, produced an initial period of economic euforia, like a drug rush. But then the piper had to be paid and that was the situation in 1989, when CAP threw a vast party for his second inauguration, with Castro as a guest of honor.

It is difficult for most of us to appreciate the chaos and havoc faced by the citizens of Caracas during those nine days in late February and early March of 1989. 

In addition to his own plane, Castro had arrived accompanied by two Soviet transport planes, later known to have been packed with munitions, weaponry of war, and other arms and grenades with “great powers of destruction”. All this was waved in with not so much as a by-your-leave. And when he departed, only a fraction of the equipage returned with him.

The Venezuelan authorities, not briefed about the unaccounted personnel and equipage brought by Castro. assumed that the disturbances which began in late February were merely local unrest. As police and national guard personnel approached the areas of riots, they fell under unremitting, unrelenting fire. By some estimates as much as 200 sharpshooters ensconced in the roofs of the city’s buildings fired and killed at will — both unarmed civilians as well as police and national guard. Areas of Caracas were virtual war zones as attested by European journalists such as José Comas, who had reported on the wars in Kosovo and Serbia. He described his coverage as, “The Caracas war front”. 

To this day we still lack an authoritative accounting of the death and bloodletting of those nine days. The attacks were so severe and the crossfire so violent that the original intent — the overthrow of CAP, Castro’s good friend –was abandoned and the backup plan was implemented. Now the Caracazo was affirmed to have been the result of heavy handed suppression ordered by CAP himself and executed by the Venezuelan authorities.

Fidel Castro called CAP to express his support and solidarity and to denounce the scum who wished to overthrow him. American newspapers dutifully reported the crocodile tear expressions of the bitter butcher.

A mere three years later, CAP was impeached and removed from office. A few years after that, Hugo Chávez, who had been involved in three coup attempts was elected president and, though dead, his administration continues to this day, under Castro’s hand-picked successor to Chávez, Nicolás Maduro.

One important note: during last 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. CAP was too much of an ideologue in his enmity of all things US and, worse, he was naive and foolish in his embrace of a rattlesnake like Castro. But when the chips were down, he acted valiantly. We are not cardboard creatures.

Fidel Castro arrives at the Teresa Carreño Theater to celebrate Carlos Andres Perez’s second inauguration on February 2, 1989. He had arrived in Venezuela accompanied by two Soviet Transport planes with war materiel which was allowed into Venezuela without being searched. Most stayed in Venezuela after Castro’s departure and was deployed in the Caracazo of February 27 – March 8, 1989. Surely all this was on his thoughts as he saw the realization of his decades-long dream close at hand.