If the U.S. and Cuba Can Change, Why Not Venezuela?
March 30th, 2008 by WILLIAM KERN
With cries for change sweeping the United States and even the ‘hermetically-sealed totalitarian regime’ of the Castro brothers, some in Venezuela are sounding downright envious. Fernando Luis Egaña writes for Venezuela’s Correo del Caroni, “Both in the United States and its hemispheric polar opposite Cuba, there are growing expectations of political, economic and social change. … The oldest democracy and the longest dictatorship on the Continent are preparing for change. May long-suffering Venezuela not be left behind.”
By Fernando Luis Egaña
Translated By Halszka Czarnocka
March 25, 2008
Venezuela - Correo del Caroni - Home Page (Spanish)
Both in the United States and its hemispheric polar opposite Cuba, there are growing expectations of political, economic and social change. Domestic and global reasons have resulted in this push for new directions.
No one knows if Barack Obama will in the end obtain the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and even if he does - whether he’ll manage to defeat Republican John McCain. But much of this feat has already been accomplished. Because the mere fact that a novice African-American senator with a Kenyan father and Anglo-Saxon mother from the Kansas plains is running head-to-head with his adversaries in the electoral preferences of American society marks a milestone in the history of the most powerful democracy in on the planet.
It’s a new stage in the march toward integration and great changes in multi-cultural assimilation that, whatever the detractors of the “Empire” may say, has been and continues to be one of the principal drivers of U.S. national progress.
From New York to San Francisco, nothing is discussed but change. That’s Obama’s campaign slogan, while his competitor Hillary Clinton proclaims the variant of “effective change.” Newt Gingrich, the notorious insurgent conservative behind the “Contract with America” fame in mid-nineties, has published a best seller entitled “Real Change,” and even McCain has gotten on the bandwagon, asserting that he represents the right kind of change.
Everybody gives his or her own meaning to the magic word, but what really matters is the perception that on the one hand, it’s necessary to alter the direction of the country, and on the other, that the time is ripe for substantial reforms in foreign policy, budgetary distribution, social programs, immigration and energy strategy.
In Washington and on Wall Street, many argue - and rightly so - that the global financial crisis is a time bomb that cannot be diffused with the same prescriptions that created it.
And oh what a paradox - 90 miles south of Miami in the backward Cuba of Fidel-type communism, there is also growing hope for change that would perforate the hermetically-sealed totalitarian regime and, as predicted Pope John Paul II on his historic visit in 1998, that makes it possible that Cuba, “will open to the world and the world will open to Cuba.”
Apparently, Raúl Castro and his cronies have realized that either they hop on the wagon of economic change and try and control it without …
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translate foreign press coverage of the U.S. election.
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Communism, Venezuela, Columnists, Hugo Chavez, Political Philosophy, Wall Street, Newsweek Blogitics, Capitalism, Black/African-American, Foreign Politics, Barack Obama, Cuba, Political Cartoons, Foreign Affairs, 2008 Elections, Minorities, Democrats, Cartoon Commentary, Hillary Clinton, Americas - N & S, Politics. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
