How Humanitarian Assistance is an Existential Threat to Maduro's and Castro's Project to Build Communism in Venezuela

"In the future, there will be fewer but better Russians." - Greta Garbo, Ninotchka, 1939
 

Maduro's forces set fire to humanitarian aide

Nicolas Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, is ordering troops to burn humanitarian aid. The usurper claims that humanitarian assistance is an existential threat and provocation to his regime. This claim is also backed by the Castro regime. However, they are not being honest about the real nature of the threat.

Venezuelan Jean Pierre Planchart, a year old, weighs 11 pounds.

Maduro, along with the Castro regime, are attempting to install a communist dictatorship in Venezuela. One of the instruments that communist regimes have used to subjugate populations is famine and rationing food to those who are loyal and denying it to those who are not.

Famine is a tool communists have traditionally used to remake societies. 

The deadliest famines in the 20th century were not in Africa but in Europe (Ukraine) and China.
Social science research has demonstrated that famines "happen only with some degree of human complicity."  Human decisions "determine whether a crisis deteriorates into a full-blown famine."

Jean Pierre Planchart malnourished inVenezuela. Pic: Dr. Livia Machado

 In the case of Venezuela, Chávez and Maduro destroyed the market in food by imposing price controls "that resulted in underproduction when the official prices did not meet costs of production. Their governments expropriated farms, ranches, and even food distributors such as butchers. There’s very little if anything produced on these expropriated territories." Rhoda Howard-Hassmann's article "Famine in Venezuela" published on August 21, 2018 in the World Peace Foundation reports:

"By 2017 malnutrition was confirmed in Venezuela, precipitating the political unrest now roiling the country. According to Antulio Rosales (“Weaponizing Hunger is a New Low for the Venezuelan President,” Globe and Mail, March 12, 2018, p.A11) and Enrique Krauze (“Hell of a Fiesta,” New York Review of Books, March 8, 2018, pp. 4-7), by early 2018 more than half of all Venezuelans had lost between 19 and 24 pounds, and 90 per cent said they do not have enough money for food."

 TRT World's Ediz Tiyansan reporting from Caracas on December 30, 2018 published the article "Child malnutrition on the rise in Venezuela" that reveals that levels of hunger in Venezuela are that of a famine.

"The World Health Organisation says, a country with 10% of its children with malnutrition is at risk, at 12% it's considered famine. In Venezuela, a recent study conducted in five different states shows that we're at 14.8%," says Huniades Urbina, President of Venezuela's Childcare and Pediatrics Society.

Despite this reality, on February 4, 2018 Maduro shipped 100 tons of aid to Cuba and on February 6, 2018 Maduro, once again, ordered humanitarian shipments of aid to be blocked from entering Venezuela. Maduro continues to double down and block aid, or actually destroy it when it enters Venezuela.

Maduro blocks aide to Venezuela while sending it to Cuba as Venezuelans go hungry

This is not incompetence, but a sinister political and military strategy that has been successfully played out elsewhere.

Maduro's regime issued ration cards for food in a country were mass hunger is an ever present reality and it is understood by many that following regime instructions, such as going to vote in the last sham election, was necessary to be eligible for rations.  The electoral calculus was clear: "Everyone who has this card must vote," said Nicolas Maduro and continued, "I give and you give." 

This is a very old playbook.

According to Felix Wemheuer, professor of Modern China Studies at the University of Cologne, in his book Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union," during the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union." 

Millions starved to death under brutal famine imposed by Joseph Stalin

However, to understand the nature of famine politics in communist regimes the monograph of Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn in the East/West: Journal of Ukranian Studies titled "Communism and Hunger" is required reading. Consider the following:

"In fact, with the exception of the 1943 Bengal famine with its approximately two million victims, all of the other major famines of the twentieth century are directly connected to socialist "experiments": in 1921 and 1922 in Russia and Ukraine ( 1million - 1.5 million deaths); in 1931, 1932, and 1933 in the USSR (6.5 million - 7.5 million deaths, of which 4 million were in Ukraine and 1.3 million - 1.5 million in Kazakhstan); in 1946 and 1947 in the USSR (1 million - 1.5 million deaths); from 1958 to 1962 in China (30 million - 45 million deaths); from 1983 to 1985 in Ethiopia (0.5 million - 1.0 million deaths); and from 1994 to 1998 in North Korea ( estimates vary from a few hundred thousand to more than 2 million deaths)."

This was not due to poor central planning and socialist inefficiencies, but a deliberate policy of genocide against targeted population to consolidate political control by eliminating those who do not support their regime. The percentage of victims in the USSR and China relative to their respective overall populations were the same (5%). In the case of the USSR that meant around 7 million deaths out of a population of 160 million and in the case of China  estimates between 30 million and 45 million deaths out of a population of 600 million.

Famine victim in China

According to Graziosi and Sysyn, "most of Ukraine's four million deaths - more than sixty percent of all the famine victims in the USSR - were concentrated in the few weeks between the beginning of April and the the end of June 1933. This points to a political decision to use famine as a weapon to solve a specific "national" problem.  

Starving mom holds her child at height of Holodomor. USSR.1933.

Furthermore, according  to Andreas Graziosi in her 2016 monograph Stalin and Mao's Famines: Similarities and Differences,  outlines the role played by "ideology; planning; the dynamics of the famines; the relationship among harvest, state procurements and peasant behaviour; the role of local cadres; life and death in the villages; the situation in the cities vis-à-vis the countryside, and the production of an official lie for the outside world."

Maduro, and his Cuban allies issued denials about the extent of the problem of hunger in Venezuela. The rejection and destruction of humanitarian assistance combined with images of tons of humanitarian assistance shipped from Venezuela to Cuba appears bizarre, but it needs to be placed in the context of previous episodes involving other communist regimes.

Both the USSR and China used Western journalists, such as Walter Duranty in Moscow and Edgar Snow in Beijing to deny that a famine was taking place and to defend the official lies of the regime. This practice continues today in Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere.

Fidel Castro lounging with Mengistu Haile Mariam, in Ethiopia in 1977

In Ethiopia, Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime, reproduced Soviet and Chinese practices when he blacked out communications, and refused access to aid agencies. 

In December 1979, during an Ethiopian military offensive, this time including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, it “was more specifically directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”

Worse yet, as starvation took hold in Ethiopia, Mengistu ordered planeloads of whisky to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his taking power. Denying that a famine was taking place. Once that could no longer be denied he then used the famine as a cover for ethnic cleansing and removing opponents.

 This history, and the role played by the Cubans, Russians, and Chinese needs to be taken into account when looking at the situation unfolding in Venezuela now.

From Maduro's twitter on September 9, 2018

The population of Venezuela today is approximately 32 million of which 1.6 million is 5%. Based on 90 years experience of communist regimes is that the number that needs to be killed through hunger to successfully terrorize and subjugate a people?

If that is the case then the efforts of the United States and other countries to deliver tons of humanitarian aid to Venezuela and break the death grip of an emerging famine in that country is in and of itself an existential threat to Maduro and his Cuban allies project of imposing communism on  Venezuelans.

It is no coincidence that Nicolas Maduro admires and celebrates the legacy of Mao Tse Tung. 

This is the real reason why humanitarian aid is considered a great provocation by the Maduro regime and his Cuban allies. It takes control from their ongoing effort to kill a lot of Venezuelans to impos their political model.

Furthermore, it is why it is important to hold those responsible for carrying out this policy accountable and brought to justice.

Cuba and China

Both Cuba and China have produced monsters that dwarfed their own lands.

Leaders of communist China and Cuba meet

By Dimon Liu

I remember the year Cuba came into my consciousness.  It was 1960, the height of famine during the years of Great Leap Forward.  I was a child living in the southern city of Guangzhou in China. Meal time meant a little rice, and whatever we could scrape together.  For nearly two years, we had no meat, fish or even cooking oil. We were starving.  All of a sudden, there was cane sugar from Cuba, and we school kids had to learn Cuban songs.

We had been on rations even before the Great Leap Forward which began in 1958. Thirty jin (one jin is about 1.1 pound) of grains per month for an adult, and fifteen jin for a child above the age of seven.  Two jin of meat and two ounces of cooking oil, also for a month.  Except for my family.  Having been categorized by the government as the enemies of the people, and tarred as the "black five sorts," our grain rations were half of everyone else's.  My mother's grain ration was 15 jin a month, but I got less than half - mine was 7 jin a month. During the times of shortages, even half a jin of ration coupon meant a great deal, but during the years of Great Leap Forward, the ration coupons were nearly useless.

The persistent gnawing of hunger felt like a sharp knife twisting and thrusting in my gut without respite, and on many a night I shed silent tears until I was finally able to fall asleep - a memory so painful and vivid that it still haunts me more than half a century later. During the day, small gangs of children roamed the streets looking for food. My pals and I, skinny 7-year olds, foraged as best we could to supplement our meager fares. We hunted frogs, birds, and water cockroaches.  We climbed trees for mulberries and nuts, and scraped tree barks for our mothers to cook. I built traps to catch rats and sparrows - the beginning of my architectural career. In truth, everything was skinny, only the rats had any meat on them. People on our streets were dying of many infectious diseases, though no one dared to say anyone died of hunger.

On my eighth birthday, I got a hard-boiled egg all to myself.  It was so rare and precious, I couldn't bear to eat it.  I put the egg in my pocket.  I took it out, looked at it, and put it back into my pocket; and on and on as I wandered the streets; because staying home might mean my older brother could snatch the egg from me.  Another small gang of children saw me with my egg, and ran towards me. I quickly stuffed the egg into my mouth, barely chewed it, and swallowed it, eggshells and all, even as I was being jumped on and pummeled.

Frank Dikotter, the historian at the University of Hong Kong who wrote "Mao's Great Famine", a book about this period, said in a social media post that "the first thing the regime did in September 1960 was to procure an extra 100,000 tons of grain and ship it to Cuba," in order to help break the economic blockade imposed by Washington on the island.  Dikotter added that "you can feed about 2000 people for a day with a ton of rice... Or over half a million people for a year."

Properly fed people rarely existed in China at that time, unless you belonged in the very small and exclusive club of Chinese Communist elite. For a child like me who received coupons for under 8 pounds of rice a month, you could have fed more than 2 million of us for a year; or about half a million Chinese adults for a year on a standard ration of 30 jin, or 33 pounds of rice per month for the amount of grain sent to Cuba.

Cuba was not the only place that China exported food to during those harrowing years. Yang Jisheng, author of the searing book "Tombstone," which documented meticulously the period of the Great Leap Forward, noted that China exported a total of 5 million tons of grains in 1959, to North Korea, Vietnam, East European countries, and especially to the former Soviet Union to help cover China’s debts when famine began; and a further 2.72 million tons in 1960, the height of starvation, along with a large quantity of cooking oil, eggs and other foodstuffs.

5 million tons of grains would have fed 25 millions adults for the year 1959, and 2.72 million tons would have fed 13.6 millions for the year 1960.

As of now, estimates of the dead during this time of famine range widely, from a low of 30 million acknowledged by the Chinese government, to a high of 80 million; and we won't have a firm idea of what the figures really were until the Chinese Communists are gone from the scene, and all the archives can be opened.

The fact remains that millions of people would not have starved to death if there were some error-correcting mechanisms that existed in the Chinese Communist system, but there were none; and millions died needlessly, and in a most painful way; as the government forcibly took the grain away from its people and shipped it overseas.  Chinese Communists often extolled their system as superior to democracy because of its efficiency. It is efficient, no doubt; but also most efficient in killing its own people.

I have often wondered if the Cuban people knew about the sufferings of the Chinese people at that time, and how many starved to provide them with food. I wondered if Fidel Castro knew, and if he did know, I wondered if he cared.  We knew Mao didn't care, or he wouldn't have shipped rice to Cuba and other places when his own people were starving.  As my mother used to say, only the leaders could afford to be so magnanimous about the sufferings of the people...

Ernesto "Che" Guevara meets Mao Zedong

Castro was never given to expressiveness for the help he received from China. Or perhaps Castro couldn't express it since he relied on the Soviet Union to remain in power, and by 1958, the Sino-Soviet split was bitter, and out in the open. Or perhaps Castro shared the derogatory views of the Soviets towards the Chinese at the time.  Diplomatic relations were established in 1960, but Castro didn't visit China until 35 years later, in December of 1995, after the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991, and long after Mao - the man who starved his own people to help Cuba – had died in September of 1976.

In a documentary about Castro, aired shortly after Castro’s death was announced on November 25, 2016, CCTV, China's state run television station, said that Fidel Castro admired Mao Zedong and “regretted not being able to get to know him." However, in his 1977 interview with Barbara Walters, which surprisingly went into considerable detail on his views about China, Castro said Mao "practically destroyed the Chinese Communist party," and that Mao "admitted [to] becoming a god and betrayed the people’s revolutionary solidarity," which Castro categorized as "Mao’s gravest error."

"The men that participate in these processes acquire great power and later abuse that power," Castro told Barbara Walters about Mao and his revolutionary comrades. "I also acquired that power, but I never abused it, nor did I retain it in my hands. I distributed it. I gave it to the revolutionary institutions," he said.

It wasn't true, of course, what Castro told Barbara Walters about himself.  If Mao had Li Zhisui, who published "The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician" in 1994, which exposed Mao's luxurious, debauched and abusive life in excruciating detail, Castro had Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, who published "The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Líder Maximo" in 2015, which described Castro's hidden life of brutality, womanizing, and outsized greed, also in excruciating detail.

I can't help but perceive a difference between Mao and Castro, even as they loom large on the international scene, both in life and in death.  Mao's atrocities were unprecedentedly large, whatever estimates one cared to use, as he unleashed famine and wave upon wave of mob violence on the Chinese people; but they felt impersonal, as if Mao, on his elevated pedestal, couldn't care less if his people suffered, lived, or died.  Not so for Castro, he seemed as if he cared, and his brutalities - gouging out eyes of a dissident here, chopping off limbs on another one there, sending his closest comrades to the executioners, and even as the numbers piled up horrifyingly, still had the feel that they were more personal.  Perhaps it is the difference between a vast continent and a small island, but both Cuba and China have produced monsters that dwarfed their own lands.

This brings me to the family of the Trudeaus.  In 1960, the same year Cuba came into my consciousness, Pierre Trudeau, the future Canadian Prime Minister, went to China as a journalist, and didn't notice that there was a famine going on. Huh? How could he be so unobservant as a journalist? Pierre Trudeau perhaps didn't want to notice, because that might have disqualified him as a future leader who was full of magnanimity when it came to the sufferings of the people, and who pridefully counted Castro, a grand practitioner of this dark art, as a family friend.  "The point is not to judge other worlds by the standards of your own," Alexandre Trudeau explained, when he had his father's 1960 book, written with Jacques Herbert, "Two Innocents in Red China", reissued in 2007. What did Alexandre Trudeau mean exactly? That the Chinese people aren't really human? That they feel no pain, and could die in the tens of millions without the Trudeaus ever noticing or caring? That civilized standards which rightly apply to the Trudeaus, need not be applied to the Chinese?

"His Hunkiness", the current Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, Pierre Trudeau's other son, issued an official statement upon Castro's death, warmly lauding Castro as “a legendary revolutionary and orator," and having "made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation," without, as is the wont of the Trudeaus, ever noticing or caring about Castro's legions of human rights abuses; as if Castro's alleged accomplishments justified or eradicated his atrocities. They don't, of course, by any stretch, but by following their father's convenient blindness, the Trudeau sons, like their father before them, are simply abetting the tyrants in furthering the people's sufferings.

Dimon Liu was born in China and immigrated to the United States in 1965. She became a human rights activist after witnessing conditions in China during a three-month trip there in 1972.

Reflections on the Chinese Cultural Revolution at 50

 Old communist leaders don't fade away but go on one last genocidal slaughter for ideological purity before departing this mortal coil

Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Mao Zedong

 Old Communists are not like old soldiers. They do not fade away.  Elderly communist leaders before they depart this mortal coil usually engage in mass killing toward the end of their lives. Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union towards the end of his tenure in power arrested over a million people, appeared to have been preparing one last massacre before his sudden death in 1953  but Mao Zedong in the twilight of his power in 1966 was able to carry out one last sustained campaign of mass killing.

Chinese red guards waving their copies of Mao's little red book

 Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in China that began ten years of bloodshed that would claim millions of lives.  First generation dictator Mao Zedong was 72 years old at the time and the communist regime had been in power 17 years and fears began to arise of reformist bourgeois elements that would change the nature of the regime. On May 16, 1966 the communist party May 16 Notification warning that the party had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary “revisionists” who were plotting to create a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”

This led to Mao calling for the creation of a "new man" Deutshe Welle reported in a Q&A on the Cultural Revolution that:

According to the Sinologist Oskar Weggel, this "new person" was supposed to be a "selfless communal being in a society free of domination, which had always wandered like a ghost through human utopias." To attain the goal, Mao called for the destruction of the "Four Olds" - old ideas, culture, customs and habits. Mao Zedong's ideas were supposed to replace them.

In reality it appears that there was an internal power struggle within the Chinese Communist Party that drove Mao to launch the cultural revolution because of elements that sought minor revisions to maintain the regime in power. The Globe and Mail provided more details on the terror that unfolded:

Students tortured teachers and beat them to death. Workers attacked one another with screwdrivers devised into spears. Temples and libraries were razed. Millions of people were banished to the countryside for “re-education.”

Red Guards targeting unlucky old man

The students organized into Red Guards that were to "sweep away all monsters and demons!” as a People's Editorial demanded. The communist party journal, The Red Flag, celebrated the slaughter: 

“The Red Guards have ruthlessly castigated, exposed, criticized and repudiated the decadent, reactionary culture of the bourgeoisie … landing them in the position of rats running across the street and being chased by all”

Although the circumstances in Cuba are different the escalating violence and call for continued ideological purity has a familiar ring. Back in 2011, Raul Castro issued a call to "popular" violence against counter-revolutionary elements at the VI Communist Party Congress Raul Castro:

"It is necessary to make clear that we will never deny our people the right to defend their Revolution. The defense of the independence, of the conquests of Socialism and of our streets and plazas will still be the first duty of every Cuban patriot."

Some policy makers and commentators believe that change in Cuba would best be carried out by those in power. One hopes that a review of other communist dictatorships and first generation leadership will disabuse them of that notion. Fidel Castro at the VII Communist Party Congress earlier this year was calling for another Russian revolution to occur.

To put it more succinctly Fidel Castro is no Gorbachev.