By Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Wall Street Journal
On
Wednesday, as Venezuelan strongman Nicólas Maduro was promising more
repression to crush relentless student protests, Russian Defense
Minister Sergei Shoigu told reporters that Moscow plans to put military
bases in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. A few days later a Russian spy
ship arrived in Havana harbor unannounced.
The
usual Cold War suspects are back. More accurately, they never left.
Former KGB officer Vladimir Putin is warning President Obama that Russia
can make trouble in the Americas if the U.S. insists on solidarity with
the Ukrainian people. Meanwhile, Latin America's aging Marxists are
lining up behind Mr. Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez.
Russia
and Cuba are finally reaping the benefits of the revolution they have
long sown in Latin America. Any chance of defeating them requires
setting the record straight about how Venezuela got so poor.
Venezuelan
politicians sold left-wing populism like snake oil for decades before
Chávez came to power in 1999. They demagogued entrepreneurs and
indoctrinated the masses with anti-businesses propaganda. From the
earliest days of the Cuban revolution, Castro was a hero in Venezuelan
universities where Cuban-Soviet propaganda flourished. By the 1960s
school children were being weaned on utopian collectivism. The
brainwashing intensified when Chávez opened Venezuela to Cuban
proselytizers.
Through
it all, the politically connected got rich, including the chavistas.
But today a large part of the population believes that business is
underhanded and greedy. This is why escaping the noose of
totalitarianism is going to be difficult. The culture of liberty has
been nearly annihilated, and even if Mr. Maduro is overthrown, that
culture must be rebuilt from the ground up.
To
be sure, social media makes it harder to put a smiley face on tyranny
than in the 1980s. Back then a doctrine like sandinismo could be
marketed by Cuba and Russia to naïve Americans as the salvation of the
Nicaraguan poor even while the Sandinista army burned Miskito Indian
villages and arrested banana-selling peasants as speculators in the
highlands.
Today
word gets around. A Feb. 18 cellphone image from the Venezuelan city of
Valencia—of a young man carrying the limp body of 22-year-old Genesis
Carmona after she was shot in the head by Maduro enforcers—has gone
viral as an emblem of the repression.
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