“[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.