Since we focus on Cuban issues in this blog, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are other groups in Miami that are concerned with non-Cuban issues.
Case in point: Venezuelans.
The Miami Herald reports that a group of Venezuelans is organizing an anti-Chavez rally in downtown Miami today. This may not seem like an extremely newsworthy story, except that it’s the first such rally in three years.
Why so long, you ask? It’s not because the Venezuelan community in Miami doesn’t care. A lot of it might have to do with the long tentacles of Hugo Chavez.
From the article:
One of the deterring factors (to protesting) has been fear, said Venezuelan human rights activist Patricia Andrade.
”I am an example of what can happen, because I’m living here and yet I have received death threats and they have taped my phone calls because of my work for human rights,” said Andrade, founder of the Venezuela Awareness Foundation. “People see what happens to me and think, `they could do that to me and to my family.”’
Of course, Chavez has his friends in Miami.
Venezuela is a country with full freedom,” said Consul General Antonio José Hernández Borgo. “They say barbarities about the president in the press. Anyone can say whatever they want, and in a place where there is freedom to do anything, it is a democracy.”
Read the article here.
Venezuela is very much a Cuban issue, a Cuban-American issue. No knows better what is like to loose a country to evil, and we are seeing a replay with Venezuela. The Venezuelans should be well advised to listen to the Cubans and their experience.
I hope we don’t make the same mistakes with Chavez that we did with Castro. I hope it won’t be 40-someodd years before Venezuelans have their freedom.
That is one lazy dictator, letting uppity protesters mass in his own front yard like that.