"If the Spaniards don't want this incident to become a problem for them, they have to rectify their conduct. I am not going to ask the King to get on his knees before me, but to recognize in some way that he exceeded his limits, that he did something that was improper because he's not the king of Latin American presidents. Speaking for myself, I did nothing 'improper,' as Zapatero has suggested. I simply made an historical observation. Moratinos, for his part, has sent conciliatory messages while throwing oil on the fire by asserting that we precipitated this incident. I don't understand Moratinos. He claims that they don't want this situation to escalate but declares in Chile that Daniel [Ortega] and I crashed with Zapatero because we were defending our Old Left, which means that the Spanish government does not understand that there have been great changes in Latin America." — Hugo Chávez, speaking on Venezuelan television, November 15, 2007
Oh, I think the Spanish government understands it a lot better now.
When Chávez attacks Moratinos, who is the very personification of the left-wing fellow traveller and has always been a cheerleader for both Castro and Chávez, there is more at play than a bruised ego. What Chávez sees is an opportunity to embark on the final phase of Venezuela's transformation into a Communist state by promoting a second "Bolivarian War of Independence" against Spain.
On the positive side, we may be witnessing the implosion of Spain's Socialist Party courtesy of their fraternal ally in the Socialist International.
The King should be happy to know that five simple words uttered in a language that was proper to reprimand a five year old has caused so much personal grief on el Mico Putumayo. Again, this proves that Chavez is not only a crazy narcissist with no connection to reality, but also an idiot with border-line intelligence.
ReplyDeleteSome town in Venezuela lost its idiot. They know where to find him, in case they want him back -which I doubt- in the Palacio de Miraflores.
The worst part is that Chavez has a transnational following in Latin America, where many need a caudillo to lead them. That explains why the continent succumbed to the "charms" of such "men" from the times of the independence from Spain onwards. That also explains why Spain does not lament the loss of those colonies, while the loss of Cuba is decried even today in popular language: Mas se perdio en la Guerra de Cuba.
Certainly, a place where "men" like Evo and Chavez, and yes, now I remember the name, Correa and others have such a following, and get elected, will have a hard time in setting itself on the road to progress.
Charlie:
ReplyDeleteFrom the time of Bolívar and San Martín, Latin Americans have had a positive genius for rejecting the best men and choosing the worst to lead them. Sometimes they stumble on a great leader like Fujimori and then they cannibalize him. Martí was probably the last of our prohombres who sincerely believed that progress and even greatness lay in store for "Our America."
"When Latin America recovers from all its necessary but short-lived convulsions, what a nursery of wonders will meet the world!" One hundred years later, we are still waiting for it to recover and "the nursery of wonders" continues to produce only freaks of Nature.
Unfortunately, Manuel, the Latin American orchard is prone to produce a lot of those freaks of Nature, who comfortably nest among poison ivy and get fed by sucking from the tits of the castroite chimera.
ReplyDeleteWhen one reads the history of Latin America, one of the first things that is render evident is the amount of conspiracies who were held to dispatch a lot of the best men of the continent.
In Cuba, well, we didn't fare much better.... either. I sometimes wonder if Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo weren't wrapped and sold by the envious and the mediocre in their same camp, as were Agramonte and Cespedes at their time.
From those treasons, there was one man who benefit in history, Fidel Castro, many years after the end of the independence war. He understood the lesson, and applied it: he did away with every man of value within the political scene of pre-1958 Cuba. And then he did away with the whole Cuba of post-1958.
Latin America is prodigal in great writers, though. But do not look for leaders of politicians. In that department, the ones who stay in the collective memory are just the instigators of coups d'etat, the caudillos, and the thieves....
Is possible the real target in this recent offensive of tirades against Spain, and the King is the Telecommunicacions infrastructure the Spaniards have built in Venezuela over the last few years. TELECOM has built fiber optics networks that are very valuable and strategic to a future integration of Cuba and Venezuela. You can bet your lunch Ramiro Valdes has his eyes trained on that "tecnological fruit" so that without costing them a cent, via the expropiations by Chavez, they can improve on Cuba's poor and technology outdated Telecomunications industry.
ReplyDeleteThey have their eyes set in many things besides those, in Cuba, for example, ETECSA has a one third Italian, one third Spanish, and one third outdated American phone network. The first two thirds are concentrated in Havana and some tourist areas, as Varadero. The rest of the country is running on a network which dates from 1957, ATT still holds the titles to the land where some installations are located which makes it the second landowner in Cuba (foreign capital hotels do not own the land on which they are built, they lease it for a fifty year period)
ReplyDeleteOne calls Cuba and the ring is European instead of American. They might be thinking in integrating the two phone services into one, totally controlled, modernized, and in the hands of a terror police state.
That and some European oil interests in Cuba, even if I don't think that there is any significative Spanish investment in such. Let's not forget that the Venezuelan oil can be refined only in two places before been exported as a finished product: Cuba and the USA.
Then you have satellite communications, which are now indispensable to keep a global terror net in working order: between the installed capacity in Cuba and Venezuela there's enough coverage to keep everybody's orders flowing seamlessly. Cuban satellite service is in the hands of the government, but I am not sure about Venezuelan sat-dishes.
Charlie:
ReplyDeleteI think the Catholic Church is still the second-largest landowner in Cuba, although AT&T, until recently at least, owned some of the best real estate on the island. It remains to be known how it was able to keep these properties when all other American concerns lost theirs.
The Church legally owns the footprint of every parish church or chapel in Cuba, and some land in cemeteries. They also own a few "orchards" for the service of (at least in Havana) two hospitals they still run.
ReplyDeleteThe Church will be the first landowner when the tyranny is gone (or the Castros for that matter) and they move to recoup a lot of land they have in "frozen" status.
ATT, on the other hand, conserves (and exerts) all rights to their land (it's NOT only where transmission and repetition towers are located, according to property records in Cuba, they own large swatches of land -for future development- all over the island and the Isle of Pines, as well)
Nothing the macao would love more than have the King kneel before him, he's expecting an apology, I hope he does not get it.
ReplyDelete