Moisés Naim
WSJ, Dec. 10, 2021
“The American response to Venezuela’s collapse has been, by turns, piecemeal and ham-handed.”
In the first half of 2019, Venezuela began to suffer gasoline shortages. This, on its face, was preposterous. The nation had the world’s largest proven oil reserves—its refineries boasted the capacity to supply the country’s needs many times over. Yet drivers up and down the land found themselves waiting days on end in lines outside gas stations, bringing to mind the old joke about how if communists took over the Sahara it would run out of sand.
At the same time, tanker ships were departing from Venezuelan terminals full of oil. They did so in contravention of U.S. sanctions, turning off their satellite tracking devices to avoid detection and heading north-northwest…toward Cuba. This image tells the fundamental story of Venezuela’s multilevel disaster. Even amid crippling gas shortages that left Venezuela in economic free fall, Caracas’s priorities were clear: Cuba’s needs come first. Always.
If this order of business doesn’t seem to make sense, that is hardly unusual. Things keep happening in Venezuela that don’t seem to make sense, that weren’t even supposed to be possible. The country has bucked so many trends and plumbed such new depths that all common explanations seem to fall short.
Mr. Naim, who served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry in the early 1990s, is Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. His new book, “The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century,” will be published by St. Martin’s Press in February.
Appeared in the December 11, 2021, print edition as ‘Venezuela’s Fatal Embrace Of Cuba A Rising Democracy Brought to Ruin.’
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