Cuba – Page 2 – The Pull Of The Land

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.

Understanding the Cuba – Venezuela Nexus V: Fidel’s Revenge III

August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 Richard Barnes

“The ‘continuity of the great work of Chávez’ does not rest on Maduro’s shoulders only. A large supporting politico-military cast of Fidel Castro devotees is key to maintaining the Communist regime in place. Above all, these powerful and dangerous functionaries admire and keenly study the Cuban regime’s ability to maintain herd control over the Cuban people while ensuring their perpetual grip on total power, all under the complacent gaze of a great part of the world.” — Diego G. Maldonado (pseudonym)

In this, our final post in the series on the Cuba – Venezuela nexus, we address the question asked in the prior installment: Cuba’s reason for these asymmetrical exchanges and contracts with astronomical profit margins is “to provide the island with needed currency. But what is Venezuela’s reason for them?”

In these posts, we’ve gotten a glimpse of Venezuela’s financial rescue of the bankrupt Cuban fiscal house. Reliable, recent figures are hard to come by and sketchy when obtained; however, most intelligence sources as well as financial publications agree that Venezuela has been Cuba’s principal source of revenue since the turn of this century. And that, at devastating financial and productivity cost to Venezuela.

But, as far as the Venezuelan regime is concerned, this devastation to the country has been well worth the pain because it has enabled the imposition of the Cuban political model onto Venezuela. A model which, above all else, maintains the rulers in perpetual power through electoral fraud, economic and social devastation, and intimidation.

As noted in other posts, the Venezuelan electoral process is “owned” by the long-dead Chavez, thereby assuring perpetuity to the state. As per Stalin, “It doesn’t matter who votes (or how many people vote), what matters is who counts the votes.” This aphorism has been vindicated time and again in Venezuela, and only cynics and fools discount it or ignore it. The effects of the collapse of Venezuela’s currency, the utter scarcity of foodstuffs, and the frightening level of crime have had the effect of propelling the largest ever emigration in Latin American history. But some have also discerned an incipient silver lining: the regime is actually talking about some electoral reforms. We’ll see.

As for the economic devastation visited on the country, Amherst Professor Javier Corrales well summarizes its purpose: “Maduro prefers economic devastation … because misery destroys civil society, and that in turn destroys all possibility to resist tyranny.” I would add that the terrible crime now rampant in Venezuela also reduces the will to resist tyranny. How effective would you be in promoting opposition to sitting politicians or filing complaints against a corrupt, unjust bureaucracy, when most of your time is focused on keeping vandals away from your front door?

Finally, to mount a truly effective opposition, the Venezuelan people would have to first overthrow a very well rooted, multi-faceted Cuban intelligence apparatus and its control accoutrements that are now pervasive. This domination pervades all civil institutions in Venezuela, even including the issuance of passports and cédulas, the Venezuelan internal passport card, without which a citizen pretty much is barred from everyday life (a powerful argument against anything even approaching this in the United States, by the way).

It betrays ignorance (and insensitivity) to minimize the deleterious impact of the cuban regiment’s experience in corralling (figuratively and literally) and demoralizing dissidence to the administrative state, i.e., the bureaucracy that was spawned with the advent of democracy in the late 40s and early 50s and has been thoroughly co-opted by the Cuba – Venezuela Nexus. Sowing fear and desperation are very valuable tools to those whose raison de e’tre is to perpetuate themselves while accumulating ever increasing power over others.

There is much more to Castro’s interest in Venezuela, an interest which predates his notoriety and which has had nefarious effects on both Cuba and Venezuela, as well as the rest of Latin America. We will touch upon this interesting and ever current subject on occasion.

Banner at Venezuela oil refinery: *Alianza Bolivariana Para Los Pueblos de Nuestra América*. A Cuba – Venezuela project seeking to integrate all Latin American countries. Other posts will address this age-old dream which actually existed during the Spanish colonial era.

All Within the State: Understanding the Cuba – Venezuela Nexus IV: Fidel’s Revenge Part II

July 13, 2021July 13, 2021 Richard Barnes

“Havana obtained and retains full access to the data of all Venezuelans, of all foreigners who reside in Venezuela, and of all industries and companies. The Cuban government knows where each of the 30 Million Venezuelans live, whether they change residences, what properties they have, if they marry or divorce, what transactions they perform, and whether they enter or exit the country. ‘Yes, everything is in Cuba, of course, the data base of all Venezuelans. From [Havana] the data base is accessed, it can be altered with added or deleted data, for instance to prohibit or allow travel….'” La Invasión Consentida, Diego G. Maldonado (pseudonym)

This is the fourth in a series of posts which seek to give an overview of Castro’s intense interest in Venezuela since before his descent from the Sierra Madre in 1958. Early on, the scent of petroleum and the power and riches it had generated for Venezuela was something he was compelled to harness to enable his hold onto power as well as to extend his influence and revolution to other countries. Success in this endeavor required that Venezuela be converted into a Cuban colony.

President Rómulo Betancourt saw and understood this immediately and, in effect, told Castro to bug off, which rejection served to intensify both Castro’s hatred towards Betancourt and his obsession with Venezuela, as manifested by numerous blood soaked guerrilla and sabotage efforts throughout the sixties. Betancourt sought to raise a multinational Latin American army to deal with Castro head on but his efforts foundered on rapidly declining health in the 70s in death in 1981.

(Incidentally, there is much evidence of Venezuelan assistance to Castro during his guerrilla wars in Cuba in the 1950s. A classic case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. But that is a story for another day.)

Whereas Castro and his designs on Venezuela were ruthlessly blocked by Betancourt, they, however, were magnanimously and joyfully welcomed by Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. Understanding this reality, sheds light on the grotesque yet very real anomaly of a small, poor island boasting outdated technology in every endeavor of life (save that of domestic espionage and terror) dominating and directing a country which is vastly larger, more modern, more powerful, and astronomically richer. It took over a half century to get to this point, although the denouement (1999 to the present) was very rapid. And there is no end in sight.

The absolute submission of Venezuela to Cuba is no longer a secret to the Venezuelan people, although the exact terms of the hundreds of multi-billion-dollar agreements and contracts are known to very few.

For example, incredibly, Chávez contracted the Cuban state as consultant for the operations of the country’s electrical grid. The picture is jolting: an island with a geographical area of under 45,000 square miles is hired to “technically assess and assist” a land 8 times the size of Cuba (over 352,000 square miles) including the 5th largest hydroelectric power station on earth! “In the 90s I had traveled to Cuba to give courses to a group of laborers. I would never have imagined that, a few years later, one of them would come here as my boss,” said an engineer of Corpolec (Venezuela’s electric company). “The Cubans had never seen a hydroelectric system and now they were assigned to lead the maintenance operations in Guri, the fifth largest hydroelectric plant in the world.”

Venezuela also contracted over 100,000 Cubans as “social workers” to go door-to-door to install fluorescent light bulbs in Venezuelan homes, as if Venezuelans needed strangers to teach them how to change lighting. She also agreed to purchase thermoelectric power plants from Cuba, paying astronomically for the privilege. Cuba imported these from Brazil. So, here is the picture: Venezuela and Brazil are among the world’s leaders in the production of electricity. They are neighbors. They share a border. Yet, in the infinite wisdom of Venezuela’s “Energy Revolution”, it was necessary to purchase thermoelectric plants from Cuba, who would in turn purchase them from Brazil, and export them to Venezuela.

All to which the Venezuelan people are heard to say, “Oh, yes! The Cubans are real experts! In blackouts, that is. So, if you have power, and are in need of a blackout, just call them.” Venezuelans are known to have a wonderfully crazy sense of humor. As my madrina used to say, “The Venezuelan will manage to come up with a joke while he is being strangled to death.” And that remains true through these desperate times.

Another climax of the absurd is the “Misión Cultural Corazón Adentro” (Cultural Mission) whereby 1,200 Cubans were contracted to “rescue” the Venezuelan culture. “When I arrived, I had to learn to play the cuatro so that I could in turn teach it to the people here,” said the leader of a Cuban squadron sent to Venezuela. The cuatro is a 4-stringed guitar played in various Latin American countries, including Venezuela, where it is considered the fundamental instrument of the country’s folklore. A Venezuelan group — C4 Trío — won a Grammy with a cuatro album. But it was necessary for Cubans to come, learn the Venezuelan cuatro, and then teach it to the benighted locals.

The profit margin on these contracts are astronomical, based on the few that have been obtained or leaked. That is Cuba’s reason for them: to provide the island with needed currency.

But what is Venezuela’s reason for them?

To be continued.

(As I write the above, tens of thousands of Cubans have taken to march on streets throughout the island to loudly and intensely protest the Communist regime and its tyranny. The demonstrators are wearing and waving American and Cuban flags and chanting “freedom”, “Cuba libre”, and many other such expressions of acute longing to be set at liberty. These manifestations reflect almost unimaginable courage. The regime has called its minions to “combat” and has attempted to shut down the internet and attacked the few reporters that are there. “This is why we are calling all the revolutionaries of our country, all the Communists, to go to the streets anywhere that these provocations are happening today, from now on through all these days,” Miguel Díaz-Canel, the “president” of Cuba declared late Sunday. True to form, Cuban military has already opened fire on unarmed, defenseless Cuban villagers. There are reports, albeit spotty, that over 50 demonstrators or opponents of the regime have either disappeared or been arrested. Cuba is applying the same measures they imposed on Venezuela to violently suppress the demonstrations against the Chávez and Maduro regimes and their fraudulent elections. Pray for the people of Cuba.)

Promotional poster for the “cultural mission”.

All Within the State: Understanding the Cuba – Venezuela Nexus III: Fidel’s Revenge Part I

July 5, 2021July 5, 2021 Richard Barnes

“My entry to Caracas has been more emocional than my entry to Havana, because here I have received everything from those who have received nothing from me.” — Fidel Castro, January 23, 1959, Caracas, Venezuela

As explained in the prior post, on that seemingly propitious visit, Fidel Castro was eventually Spurned by Rómulo Betancourt, who then proceeded to defeat Castro’s efforts to subvert and overthrow his democratically elected government as well as to disrupt the next elections where the Venezuelan people elected Raúl Leoni, who also successfully blocked Castro’s nefarious efforts against Venezuela.

In early 1992, Hugo Chávez led an attempted leftist military coup against the elected president, Carlos Andrés Pérez. In November of that same year, from prison, he led yet another coup attempt. Both attempts failed but not before the deaths of at least 150 people, although historians believe several hundred were killed.

Records indicate that preparations for these coups actually began in the 1970’s under former Communist guerrilla fighter, Douglas Bravo. He initiated an “infiltration” strategy with the objective of taking power via the Venezuelan military. In the early 80s, Chávez joined in this enterprise, having founded a “Bolivariano” movement with the same objectives. Such reports help explain former president Rómulo Betancourt’s concerns and his working to organize a coalition of Latin American armies to fight Castro in the 1970s. His plans never came to fruition as his health deteriorated followed by his death in 1981.

Unsurprisingly, according to officially unconfirmed reports, as well as the excellent (but poorly edited) history, El Delfín de Fidel, Castro was behind and helped organize much of this subversive activity, even placing sleeper agents in Venezuela in the late 80s to foment unrest. His intent was to use Chávez as the face of the coup so as to avoid retaliation by the United States.

By then, Castro desperately needed financial succor, as Cuba had entered its “special period” when aid from the Soviet Union had been severely reduced. Venezuelan Major Orlando Madriz Benítez reported that Castro also worked to falsely assure President Pérez that there was no truth to reports of an impending coup. Infuriatingly, but also credibly, in addition to Castro, future president, Rafael Caldera also knew of the coup. Castro and Chávez were to have ensured he would have been named interim president as had been the case with leftist Wolfgang Larrazábal after Marcos Pérez Jiménez was overthrown 34 years earlier.

This explains why Caldera pardoned Chávez in 1994, a mere two years after the coup attempts. This freed a man who at least twice had plotted to overthrow the elected government and who went to jail with the blood of many on his hands. That same year, 1994, he flew to Cuba where Castro had organized a massive reception.

And here was the inchoate, yet palpable incunabula of Castro’s inadvertently prophetic statement, “I have received everything from those who have received nothing from me.” For here, Castro and Chávez, in a firm, mutual embrace agreed to proceed on their common path of “the anti-imperialism of our era….”

By 2009, ten years after Chavez’ first inauguration, fifteen years after his pardon and portentous visit to Havana, Cuban functionaries were present throughout the whole of the Venezuelan territory as the face of multitudinous “social programs”. By then, Cuba jointly administered the Venezuelan ports (some would drop the word jointly), she had ensconced herself firmly in the army and navy and was well on her way to management of Venezuela’s internal security apparatus, including identification documents and passport control. And there is much more.

But Cuba did not do this for free. She was receiving over 100,000 barrels of oil daily, in addition to hundreds of no bid contracts for projects and services at astronomically priced rates. So great was the financial impact that as Venezuela sank from positive to negative GDP growth, Cuba rose from negative to positive.

So, Castro’s words in 1959 can be read as a prophecy of what was to come a generation later when indeed the Venezuelan people will have begun giving “everything” to Castro while “receiving nothing from” him.

However, actually, they did receive “something” from him, as we will discuss in future posts.