Venezuela – Page 9 – The Pull Of The Land

Something Lost

April 12, 2022April 12, 2022 Richard Barnes

This being Easter Week, I thought it good to re-publish the post below, “Something Lost”, especially considering the comments by the old schoolteacher towards the end of the post.

I do not doubt that he was right: “I feel there was something lost, truly I do.”

Since I also remember the days he refers to — when the Bible was read and prayer made in class — that marks me as a Troglodyte. Maybe so, but my sense is similar: there was something lost.

I wish you all a good Easter Week.

Something Lost

A few years ago, I visited Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on a personal matter, after an absence of close to four decades.

To drive and walk around was to invite affecting memories, not only of Bethlehem, but of family, of childhood friends, of the steel company, of Venezuela, of what could have been. I was offered the opportunity to visit my uncle’s old former apartment site on Market Street, from which the Bethlehem Steel stacks are clearly, and augustly, visible decades after her bankruptcy in 2001 and dissolution in 2003.

While in town, I came across the transcript of an interview of the late Earl J. Bauman, a teacher in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania high schools for 30 years, who also worked for several years at Bethlehem Steel during World War II, and who otherwise led an eventful life.

Our teachers in El Pao were recruited in Bethlehem, although not all were from there. For instance, one of my teachers, Mrs. Miller, was from New Mexico and boy did she resent Florida being named “The Sunshine State”! She firmly believed, and could “prove”, that New Mexico was the true Sunshine State.

Mr. Bauman’s comments seem to be coming from my own Bethlehem Steel teachers in El Pao, Venezuela.

I believe the reader will appreciate the commentary by Mr. Bauman (1910-January 12, 2000), born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was the son of George and Matilda Bauman née Shearer. He was married to Grace E. Bauman, née Shoenberger.

Mr. Bauman taught history, government, and economics. A full transcript is linked below for those readers who would appreciate reading more of what he had to say.

Excerpts:

Well, I was born here in Fountain Hill [now a suburb of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania] in 1910. We’ve been residing here ever since that time.

I attended the Fountain Hill School, and then went to Liberty High and then I quit. I was making more money than my dad was playing with a dance orchestra. We used to make as much one night as he made in a week just playing with the big bands. And then one thing led to another, and the Depression hit. And finally, there was no music market. I went to South America in one summer playing with a band, and come back, and then it was difficult to find any kind of work, because the Depression hit. It hit pretty hard. And then I had an opportunity to go back to school, then I went to Moravian Prep. And I finished up my high school work there.

Then I went to Moravian College and earned my Bachelor’s. And then, of course, it was still difficult to get work. I worked at the steel company as a clerk in the beam yard offices, and on their police force during the early period of the World War II. And then finally a teaching job.

….

And then I taught until I guess it was about the late Forties [1948] when I decided to go back to Lehigh for my Master’s degree in history, and I finished that, I believe it was 1954, somewhere around in there. Men like Dr. Harmon was the head of the history department, Dr. Gipson, Dr. Brown, and I don’t think any of them are there anymore. Some may have died, passed on, retired. And then I kept on teaching.

….

Teaching wasn’t quite the pleasure it used to be. Yeah, that changed quite considerably.

….

That’s the flu epidemic you’re talking about, yes. I remember because, and I can even take you where the hospitals were and they died like flies [emphasis mine, RMB]. It would have been right across the street from where I did my undergraduate practice teaching where this junior high school is now, right across the street in that area there, they had built these temporary wards. The hospital up here couldn’t handle it. It was too small. I remember that, yes. I remember a lot of— You’ll see in the pictures, see at that time I would have been nine years old, and I did get around and my parents talked, but that wasn’t the only thing, we had a lot of things like there was scarlet fever, and diphtheria, and polio. So many of my classmates were afflicted….

…. You had to put on your porch, your house would be quarantined, that’s the word, diphtheria here and scarlet fever there, and measles here, measles there, and today it’s wonderful how all these youngsters have been protected against these physical ailments, which make them more competitive in their life today.

[Note: the sick were quarantined. The rest went on with their work and lives. For discussions on quarantine and the current approach in most states and countries, see here, here, here, here, and here. Mr. Bauman’s allusion to the “flu epidemic” where “they died like flies” is a reference to the Spanish Flu, or The Great Influenza. See here for more.]

[Was crime a big problem?] No. No. You had nothing like—I can remember, we used to— I don’t think any of the neighbors really did much in the way of locking doors, no such thing. (chuckles) As a matter of fact, maybe this is something we should have kept in Fountain Hill here. In those days when I was a youngster, we had a curfew. When that whistle blew, you got off the street, you better not be out on the street unless you were with a parent.

….

So they said to me, ‘Well, would you do it?’ I said, ‘You’re asking me?’ I said, ‘I know that you squeeze a trigger somewhere and the projectile comes out the front, that’s all I know.’ I said, ‘I don’t think I can do much for them.’ Somebody said, ‘Well, why don’t you try it?’ One person suggested that I call the Marine barracks and get help. So I did, and you’d be surprised how much fun I had over the years teaching safety and all this and that and I can’t hit the broadside part of a barn, and I coached for 15 years and one of my teams went to the state finals, so we won (inaudible) of the division title after I got to Liberty where we got a large student body. Two southern divisions and we had a District 11 and a Northeastern regional championship and we went to the state finals. Now my youngster has, he picked it up, but we wouldn’t let him have any rifles here at home until he became, I thought qualified. I hate to put material like that in the hands of kids. Now of course, he’s a specialist. He loads his own ammunition. He has guns and pistols. He’s in a pistol league and he can shoot. He stands 75 feet away and he’ll knock your ears off. He has terrific scores, close to 300, shooting at 75 feet with high-caliber pistol. He (inaudible) shoots better than a lot of the policemen. He says, one of the faults of the policeman, he said the policeman doesn’t know his tool that well. He said they misuse it.

….

Well, I remember, you wouldn’t remember this, but I remember when the Lord’s Prayer was banned from school and that was like—I don’t know, I can’t see it because of that, but I think the morale tone of the school began to decline. The mode of dress became careless. The mode of conduct became care— Not by all the students. Some students still come from a home that’s still a home and that insists on certain moral standards.

And I guess a lot of it came from the aftermath of the wars and there would be a lot of things that influenced it, but I think the dropping of that in school was one thing that wasn’t good, because I remember we always had—I used to have my youngsters, and I never had one refuse, and I had Catholics, Protestants, Jewish students in my class, and I always used to read our schedule. And I think once a week we got a guidance period and I used to plan, I felt the kids should take part in opening exercises. It exposes them a little bit into leadership. I used to have them all read passages, and I didn’t insist that anybody read any specific passage, but they were allowed to read from the Old Testament, the New Testament, whatever they would like to read, and then they would lead the Lord’s Prayer, and then we’d have the salute to the flag. It was sort of starting the day off in a sort of moral tone in a way.

Then from then on, things would go from one thing to the other. But I missed that, and I thought it was something that was lost through it. I can’t prove it. I’m not sure. Maybe it were the other factors that made this moral tone of dress and carelessness go down, because as soon as kids start coming in my classes with jeans on and patched—And it wasn’t that they came from poor parents because they had money, because the kid had more money in his pocket as spending money than his new pair of pants and shirt would cost, and they had weeds galore in them. If they weren’t smoking Chesterfields20, it was something else. They were loaded with money. And that may have had something to do with it, the income of the families.

So, I don’t know, I think there’s a lot of factors and the fact that we dropped the reading of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer and all that sort of thing sort of took something out of the classroom. I don’t know. I felt something was lost.

After it was gone, well, then what could you do? I mean, the law said you didn’t dare do it, so you didn’t do it. You still had the salute to the flag, and then oh, in the beginning I didn’t stop altogether, but I didn’t break the law. I asked them to have a moment of silence, soft prayer to themselves. I don’t recall ever anybody objecting to that, and then we turn around then and had the salute to the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance and that sort of thing.

But I feel there was something lost, truly I do.

….

For those interested in reading further, the full transcript is linked below.

Microsoft Word – bauman_95_101.doc (lehigh.edu)

Bethlehem Steel main plant, Bethlehem Pennsylvania

The stacks as seen from Fountain Hill borough.

Mrs. Miller never forgave Florida for “stealing” New Mexico’s logo. Above is a 1932 license tag proving her case. The logo was first used by New Mexico in the 1880’s. Florida was known as “The Citrus State”. But they cleverly adopted their current logo by formal resolution, something New Mexico had failed to do. And the rest is history.

Bethlehem steelmaker headquarters imploded | Fox News Video

The demolition of the former World Headquarters of Bethlehem Steel.

Myth: Initially, Fidel Castro Had No Interest in Communism

April 2, 2022April 2, 2022 Richard Barnes

The corollary is a variation of “the devil made me do it”. In the case of Castro, the received text is that the United States made him do it.

And that is yet another modern canard.

We’ve looked at the origins of Communist ideology in Latin America (see Protevangelium and prior posts) and demonstrated that such predated the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention 20th Century American foreign policy. This is not to argue that United States’ policies are without fault (they have much to answer for, especially since the mid-19th century, but that is another tale). Our point is simple: the America-drove-Fidel-and-Hugo-(not-to-mention-Ho)-to-Communism is a ridiculous assertion, albeit a dangerously misleading one.

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, thereby breaking the Hitler-Stalin Pact (officially called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), Fidel Castro was a 15 year old high school student in the prestigious Colegio de Belén in Havana. The prior year, 1940, Fulgencio Batista had been elected president of Cuba and immediately set about to court Communist political support.

Batista legalized the Communist party and enabled the return of Fabio Grobart and Gustavo Machado, along with others from exile in Mexico. They had all been expelled (see here) from Cuba for their subversive activities seeking the overthrow of the Cuban government and the installation of a Communist regime. What possessed Batista to believe these men had shed their nefarious ideology and Comintern membership and would now play fair remains clouded in political, historical, and psychological mystery. Other than the average politician’s lust for power, further explanations need to be sought elsewhere. The fact remains that Batista enabled the Communists in Cuba.

Grobart’s and Machado’s mission was to serve as Soviet liaison in the Caribbean region and to support the development of Communist parties therein. Seeing Batista’s naiveté, Grobart moved the general quarters of the Latin American Comintern to Cuba from Mexico, wherefrom, as its director, he now had a free hand for his mission not only in Cuba, but in all of Latin America, a role which he and Machado undertook with great relish and effectiveness.

While Grobart and Machado did their thing establishing the Comintern in Havana, the Jesuits in the same city were doing theirs, indoctrinating their students, sons of well-to-do Cuban families, in the Colegio de Belén. The Jesuits had been expelled from all Spanish lands, including Cuba, in 1767, by decree of King Carlos III of Spain. That decree was lifted in the 19th Century and the Jesuits returned to Cuba in 1853, once the decree was overturned and Queen Isabella II founded the Colegio de Belén. For more on Jesuit expulsions in the 18th century see here.

Counterintuitively, Colegio de Belén was a hotbed of pro-Spanish Republic (Communist) sentiments. This can seem surprising because, as popularly conceived, Roman Catholics were supporters of Francisco Franco (see here). Nevertheless, as usual, the easy or superficial supposition is not always the correct one. A recent Jesuit history recounts a representative event: a Jesuit who served as something of a chaplain to Francisco Franco but who joined the Communist party after the war.

What is not disputed is the historically well-documented political involvement of the Jesuits throughout the order’s history. As its members focused on “helping the poor” while they educated the sons of the elites, their remedies tended towards Socialistic solutions with a patina of Scriptural justification. Of course, a thorough understanding of the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal”, would have helped the order temper its Socialistic leanings. That Commandment formed the basis of the Fifth Amendment to the United States’ Constitution which, when properly applied, prohibits the taking of life or property “without due process of law….”

Neither the Commandment nor the Amendment are more than a glint in the pen or gun of hardened thieves’ or politicians’ intent on taking what is not theirs. And Castro’s high school career among the Jesuits did not create any meaningful deterrence against such takings.

One other characteristic Colegio de Belén strengthened and developed in Castro was a hatred against The United States, for their humiliation of Spain in the late Spanish American War. See War for more information on that event.

Both traits — lack of respect for others’ lives and property and hatred for America — were initially instilled in Castro by his father (see here) who was cruel to his workers, mostly from Haiti, and who hated the Americans although he became very rich working and doing business with them.

When Hitler broke the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the United States and Britain formally allied themselves with the Communists. The Soviets opened an embassy in Cuba with an ambassador who represented them in both Havana and Washington. Upon the opening of the embassy in Havana, Grobart and Machado went to work with alacrity and by the end of 1944 inaugurated a series of “cultural exchange” programs, to which Colegio de Belén sent a student delegation, among which was Fidel Castro.

(Note the year: 1944 — the war was not yet over, the Soviets and the Americans were “allies”, but the Soviets always had other plans besides survival, and they never lost sight of such.)

The dissertations were fulsome in their praise of the Communist revolution and its eventual worldwide triumph. Castro was especially impressed with Gustavo Machado’s oration relating his efforts to recreate a Latin America united under the Communist flag. He dwelt on the massive petroleum reserves in Venezuela, who at the time was the principal exporter of petroleum in the world and the third producer after the United States and the Soviet Union. According to Machado, Venezuela’s riches would be more than sufficient to finance a Latin America union allied to the Soviets.

Machado’s comments rang true. Fast forward to the late 50s and one finds Venezuela and Cuba among the richest countries in Latin America, both being major exporters of petroleum and sugar, respectively.

Upon conclusion of the Second World War and the outbreak of the Cold War, the Soviet Union continued, with renewed vigor, to work for control over Cuba and Venezuela. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro, having completed his tenure in Colegio de Belén, entered the University of Havana school of law and immediately linked up with extreme leftist gangs.

Readers will need to go to other sources for details on Castro’s violent acts during his student years, not only in Cuba but in the Dominican Republic and in Colombia (the “Bogotazo” in 1948). For our present purposes it is sufficient to know that he was no late bloomer. His North Star was taking power as a Communist, not only in Cuba, but in Venezuela and then all of Latin America. He saw himself as a mystical, Communist José Martí, Simón Bolivar, Francisco Miranda, and more; one who would embody and realize his understanding of the goals and dreams of those men.

He was engaged in many violent activities including his murderous attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, for which many of his comrades were executed but he and his brother, Raul, were spared thanks to Roman Catholic intervention. Batista, ignorant that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different result, foolishly amnestied them in 1955 upon which they exiled themselves to Mexico only to return in 1956 and set up headquarters in the Sierra Maestra from whence the Communists eventually triumphed with no small military assistance from Venezuela.

In Venezuela, meanwhile, the era of coups interspersed with duly elected governments continued (see here). By the time Castro returned to Cuba in 1956, Venezuela was ruled by Marcos Pérez Jiménez (see here), and his links with Venezuela continued to strengthen.

*Colegio de Belén*, circa 1940, the time that Castro was a student there

Fidel Castro, far left, second row from top, circa 1942, *Colegio de Belén* basketball team

Raul (B. 1931) and Fidel Castro (1926 – 2016), circa 1964.

Vyacheslav Mkhaylovich Molotov, for whom the Molotov Cocktail is named, (1890-1986) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893-1946), in 1939 after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop (Stalin-Hitler) Pact.

Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973), circa 1934

Aftermath of “El Bogotazo” in Colombia, 1948. One of Castro’s early international involvements.

Caribbean and South American Communism Protevangelium

March 25, 2022March 25, 2022 Richard Barnes

In recent posts we have documented the fact that Communist activity in Cuba and Venezuela did not begin with Fidel Castro, let alone Hugo Chavez.

Communism did not arise in Cuba as a reaction to Batista or in Venezuela in revulsion to Gómez or Pérez Jiménez. Nor did it come because of the “horrors” of the United States’ invasion of Cuba or her “exploitation” of Venezuela (or insert any south-of-the-border country). The usual shibboleths insisted upon by our betters simply will not hold under more than casual examination.

Communistic ideals, preached in the Paris communes in the 19th century predated the Spanish American War as did Lenin’s radicalism and destructive activism as well as his admiration for the French Revolution. His initial hateful attitude was directed to the Russian Tsarist regime. His glee at the outbreak of the First World War had nothing to do with the United States, which entered that cavalcade of horrors towards its end. He wanted war and mayhem because he was convinced it would enable the overthrow of the Tsarist dynasty and the consolidation of power under a Communist regime. In this he was correct.

But the United States did not enter into his fevered dreams at that stage.

Neither did she enter into the fevered imagination of another admirer of the French Revolution: Simón Bolívar. Like Lenin, Bolívar was an acolyte of the Jacobins and, initially, of Napoleon, who was seen as the one who would ensure the Revolution would endure and advance. If one is to judge Bolívar by his fruits, one would inevitably be confronted with the parallels between the bloodshed and mayhem in France and that in South America. One would see that in both cases, the fruit was bitter, and the deleterious effects, long-lasting, persisting to this very day. The power and glory of late 18th and early 19th Century France and South America are no more, and no comeback is on the horizon.

And neither, at the time, vocalized any blame to America for their own disastrous policies and actions. The rationalizations and blame-game came much later by way of their advocates and fellow travelers seeking to justify the savagery and terror as well as their own consolidation of power and overarching control over people: their own and others. (For this, American universities and high schools will One Day give an account.)

So, as for instance, we have the Cuban, Paul Lefargue (Lefargue), one of the most influential Communists who predated the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Lefargue was born in Cuba in 1842 and died in Paris in 1911. He married Karl Marx’ daughter, Jenny, and the two of them were indefatigable in their successful promotion of the Communist virus in France and Spain, from whence it sailed back to the Caribbean and South America where the successful infiltrators, the Polish Comintern agent, Fabio Grobart (1905-1994), and the Venezuelan Comintern agent, Gustavo Machado (1898-1983) (agents) both were enthusiastic carriers, having promoted the objective conditions necessary for its propagation: hatred for the colonial past and for the United States present.

Hugo Chávez was born in 1954. His first overt coup attempt was in 1992. However, to understand him, his actions, and the worldview that motivated them, one must review well over a generation before, as this blog has striven to do.

Fidel Castro was born in 1926. His first overt coup attempt was in 1953 (ignoring the aborted 1947 attempt to overthrow Trujillo in the Dominican Republic). However, here too, one must provide a broader context well beyond Castro, to understand his actions and motivations, setting aside the psychological aspects.

Absent the actions and evangelistic fervor of Paul Lefargue, Fabio Grobart, or Gustavo Machado, there would have been no Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, or Nicolás Maduro regardless of what the United States did or did not do. Special mention must also be accorded to Douglas Bravo, the Venezuelan guerrilla and erstwhile Castro ally, whose long-term strategy of infiltration of the Venezuelan armed forces and the use of Simón Bolívar as a euphemism for Marxist ideology enabled and ensured the rise of Chávez and Maduro and continues to pay dividends to this day. (Gustavo Machado had the same idea but was discovered during the Gómez dictatorship, resulting in his exile.)

Of course, these men did not act alone: the Comintern keenly sought and aided their success in the Americas; women of means and influence as well as United States reporters, bureaucrats, academics, and politicians were devoted disciples and promoters. Whether knowingly or duped is irrelevant; the results were horrible just the same.

Last photo taken of Lenin (1870-1924) in 1923. By this time he had had 3 strokes and was mute.

Early Communist activity in Cuba and Venezuela

March 15, 2022March 15, 2022 Richard Barnes

In our prior post we noted pre-Bolshevik and early post-Bolshevik Communist activity in Cuba and Venezuela (here), concluding with the arrival of Fabio Grobart in Cuba in 1922 and his role, along with Venezuelan Communist Gustavo Machado, in organizing the Cuban Communist Party. Grobart was an excellent organizer, having set up multiple cells with astounding success in infiltrating government, academia, and business. He recruited Fidel when the latter was an adolescent and remained his advisor till his death in 1994.

Machado was from one of the richest families in Venezuela. He was born in 1898 and by 1914 was already agitating against the General Gómez regime, making stratospheric statements about liberty and democracy, all the while seeking a Communist totalitarianism for his country. He entered Harvard and then the Sorbornne in Paris, where he participated in the founding of the French Communist Party.

Grobart and Machado had met in New York at his brother’s wedding — his brother, Eduardo Machado, married the daughter of Elmer Allison, a founding member of the Communist Labor Party of America. Birds of a feather….

Upon Gustavo Machado’s graduation in Paris, he signed up with the Comintern and was summoned by Grobart to join him in Cuba. The tactic they used most successfully in recruiting impressionable young men was fomenting hatred against the United States and presenting Communism as the most effective competing worldview. The hatred was fomented most effectively by using the “racism card” — the gift that keeps on giving.

Fidel Castro was born in 1926 to Ángel Castro and Lina Ruz, the daughter of a family who worked in his hacienda. The elder Castro’s adultery was not amusing to Mrs. Castro, who threatened divorce, causing her husband to resort to chicanery to appear bankrupt, thereby blunting the damages his wronged wife could seek.

Fidel Castro’s mother, Lina Ruz, was steeped in santería and his father is remembered for cruelty, especially his skill with the whip, used against his laborers. “The image of Ángel Castro with a whip in his hands and a gun in his holster yelling orders to the black Haitians on his property … ” was well known. Also, the elder Castro was possessed of a passionate hatred against the Yanquis, for having destroyed the once-great Iberian empire. Nevertheless, working with the americanos, he became one of the wealthiest men in Cuba, owning a 30,000-acre hacienda, with its own railroad and train.

At the time of Fidel Castro’s birth, Grobart and Machado had emigrated to Mexico to avoid prosecution for subversion. From Mexico they continued their activities, with a special focus on Venezuela, on whose behalf they founded the Revolutionary Party of Venezuela, which later became the Communist Party of Venezuela.

In Nicaragua, Augusto Sandino (Prior post) was also active and the Comintern ordered Machado to travel there and offer support, which he promptly did with success. In Venezuela, Communist activity was also in fervent, as “The Generation of 1928”, a group of university students led by Rómulo Betancourt — who would later mature and become anti-Communist — attempted a coup against General Gómez.

Although Julio Mella was assassinated by a fellow Communist in Mexico (prior post), the deed provided the pretext for violent rioting and pillaging by University of Havana “students” which, ultimately, persuaded the United States administration to work against the then president, Gerardo Machado (no relation to Gustavo) and remove him from office in 1933. However, riots persisted until Fulgencio Batista intervened and vowed to work with all parties, including the Communists and the Americans. He evidenced his good intentions by legalizing the Communist Party of Cuba, thereby sealing his and his country’s doom less than two decades later. Few realize the role the Franklin Roosevelt administration played in facilitating the rise of Batista, however inadvertently.

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, further ferment occurred with the failed Falke expedition in 1929, a Quixotic attempt to overthrow General Gómez by sea. Although almost comical, it produced bloodshed and wide destruction.

By 1934, with the Communists legalized in Cuba, Fabio Grabart and Gustavo Machado returned to continue their nefarious yet successful activities.

The above narrates chaotic, seemingly unconnected events. They are indeed chaotic, but they are not unconnected. The spirit of totalitarianism feeds on anarchy and seemingly meaningless death, mayhem, panic, and fear. Its promulgators foment such an environment because it prepares their road to power and control.

“Generation of ’28” student Communists. Future president Rómulo Betancourt is in second row, second from left. He later turned against Communism and earned the eternal hatred of Fidel Castro.

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.