The Castro virus, from the tricontinental to the Sao Paulo Forum

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 18/11/2024

Guest columnist.
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In 1966, specifically in the first two weeks of January, the city of Havana witnessed a conclave that Fidel Castro christened The Tricontinental. The objectives were, the quotation marks are deliberate, "to liberate the peoples," "to seek world peace," and "to support Cuba against the United States empire." History shows us that, in reality, it was about generating guerrilla groups in different countries in America, exporting gunmen to Africa (Che Guevara is the most famous case), and obtaining financing for the Castro regime.

It must be admitted that Fidel had a relative success, since, for example, with Salvador Allende he managed to win Chile over, and with the ERP, Montoneros and Tupamarus he caused destabilization in Argentina and Uruguay. However, his plans failed in the face of military officers who took on the defense of their countries, among them Augusto Pinochet, Rafael Videla and Hugo Banzer Suarez.

In the region, the 1980s had two characteristics: 1) Military dictatorships handed over power to democratic forces, and 2) Countries in the Americas implemented free market and capitalist reforms, Bolivia being one of the most successful cases. Additionally, the Soviet Union was disintegrating and the process of globalization was beginning.

With a globalized world undergoing a technological revolution, it seemed that totalitarian threats were things of the past, or at least reduced to a small Caribbean island without much weight. However, it was a mistake not to realize that the misery suffered by the Cuban people was the perfect façade to cover the criminal intentions of Fidel Castro's mafia.

It just so happens that, while the West was looking forward to the arrival of the 21st century with trade agreements and integration policies, Castro, with the help of Lula Da Silva, was renewing his revolutionary fetishes and his destabilizing strategies, since they replaced focoism with mass mobilization; they went from celebrating the breakdown of relations with the United States to declaring themselves victims of a blockade, and they used the resources from the well-meaning European progressivism and narcodollars to build narratives around thugs, military coup-mongers and drug traffickers like Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales. The Sao Paulo Forum would be a new façade for an old intention: to expand the sphere of influence of the Cuban dictatorship.

Here a valid question is: why was he luckier than the first attempt?

I find at least two factors: 1) Educational systems hijacked by progressivism, and 2) The absence of a clear defense strategy on the part of the United States.

Those of us who attended university between the late 90s and early 2000s, in the midst of the bloody events of the Water War, the Coca Conflict and the Gas War, witnessed a furious process of cancellation, since it was almost sacrilegious to openly condemn Evo Morales and his bandits.

My teachers almost unanimously celebrated the fact that coca growers and other groups of highway robbers set fire to public property, burned police cars and overthrew elected officials. I still remember the shouts of joy from one of my teachers after Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada resigned.

Years later, living in Argentina, I was able to see that renowned professors from the University of Buenos Aires exhibited similar behavior when Evo Morales won the 2005 elections. It seemed that common sense and sound criticism had been removed from classrooms and academic spaces.

On the other hand, with the United States focused on fighting Islamic terrorism, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez had carte blanche to create narco-states and generate humanitarian crises, the same ones that are now used as mechanisms of hybrid war against the American people.

The way it works is this: Castro-Chavez governments impoverish their people to the point that they are forced into exile. Understandably, most Latin Americans do not migrate out of choice; they do so out of poverty, insecurity, defenselessness, lack of a future, lack of freedom. But here comes the most perverse detail: with families divided, dictators secure a source of foreign currency, which in cases like Bolivia exceeds the exports of certain products and services.

In closing, history has given Donald Trump the opportunity to close his political career by promoting the end of 21st Century Socialism, that dangerous Castro virus.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».