When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Venezuela

Venezuela On The Brink, Lessons From Castro And ​Perón

Colombian novelist William Ospina had advice for Fidel Castro, and now for Nicolas Maduro. Given the discontent with modern capitalism, Latin America must offer a realistic and democratic alternative.

Maduro at Fidel Castro's 90th birthday celebration
Maduro at Fidel Castro's 90th birthday celebration
William Ospina

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez told Cuba's communist ruler Fidel Castro that his island nation was now the only, truly free country. Fidel did not much like the comment as it meant admitting his country's dependence on the Soviet Union, but he ended up agreeing.

Clearly Cuba has had to pay a very dear price for its independence, just as Venezuela is doing now, amid a situation that is becoming less tenable by the day. President Nicolás Maduro has said that if attacked with "blood and fire," he will respond in kind, which effectively means heading toward a civil war. The situation there is tragic.

Cuba and Venezuela are popular but imperfect regimes, besieged by an implacable enemy: global neoliberalism that opposes state intervention in the economy and demands that the citizen's welfare become subordinate to the laws of the market. In countries run by neoliberal systems, healthcare, education and social security are private and highly profitable businesses that are nevertheless deficient, and costly for the citizen. In Cuba and Venezuela, the state truly concerns itself with health, education and pensions, but private enterprise is seriously restricted.

Real socialism, which in truth is an alliance of distributive justice and individual freedoms alongside what the writer Jorge Luis Borges called "a strict minimum of government," has yet to be invented. Current, authoritarian versions of socialism will not last, though under the pressure of current circumstances, plutocratic and heartless states will likely face an equally short future. Meanwhile, the only way to avoid local wars, which resolve nothing, is to have freely competing democracies. It is a global issue and its resolution will be global: through a showdown between cruel and predatory neoliberalism and the general interest.

The Argentine example might be of some use. Since the time when General Juan Domingo Perón fueled the idea that the Argentine people also had the right to own their country's riches and after a violent series of guerrilla fighting and military regimes, the country has seen radically different ideas alternate in power. Thanks to education and a vigorously politicized society, everyone there knows that clinging to power is useless, and rather it is the people who must lift you to high office even as you accept the existence of an outspoken, active opposition.

Our countries have so many problems that strong opposition to policies is inevitable. But not everything has to be done through the state. The political plans of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, Chavismo, form a lucid and generous project that runs the risk of deviating into an authoritarian and exclusive regime, just when all Latin American states should be moving toward systems of complex, diverse democracies. The problem is that power is inebriating and feeds vain illusions. The state starts to be perceived as an end in itself not a means, and that is poison to the lofty ideals of civilization, because anyone who idealizes the state and falls in love with power, has abandoned the spirit of creative adventure that healthy politics require.

Why such fear of the infection of capitalism?

In one of the opportunities I had to converse with Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader told me, "The thing is, our institutions have grown old." So "renovate them," I replied, "with your famous youth." He asked me what I meant. I responded, sincerely, saying "as far as I am concerned, you're still very young." I know now what I should have said: that there was a real youth in Cuba that sympathized with the revolution but wanted new opportunities, and which had to be allowed to reinvent the model.

Perón in 1946 — Photo: Wikipedia

Why such fear of the infection of capitalism, with its televisions and internet, when nobody has alternatives to these things? Many of us who grew up with television, consumerism and the constant enticement to become rich, are as critical as socialists, if not more, of capitalism's predatory inhumanity and irrationality.

Recently I said to President Maduro that he should free political prisoners, revoke the service ban on opposition leaders and call fresh elections: the same ones the Bolivarian regime liked so much when it could win them easily. I also suggested he should not fear losing at the polls, as a loss is more likely than not, provisional. An honorable defeat is worth much more than a victory deemed unworthy in the eyes of an electorate that knows what is going on. In Venezuela, many know that the present crisis is due much less to the socialist system itself as the unfortunate manipulation of oil prices and a programed restriction of supplies blamed on the system, which really has nothing to gain from such a move.

The opposition leader Leopoldo López has now been moved from prison to house arrest, but it would have been more intelligent to simply free him, as it would all other political detainees. An opponent in jail is a martyr, and it is time to understand that prison resolves nothing, and can never be an instrument of good governance.

I know Cuba needs Venezuela, but for that Venezuela must first exist. Cuba can today negotiate improvements to its economic situation allowing the rise of new community initiatives, without ever negotiating away its social protections or universal education. Let a new generation of Cubans, many of whom are grateful to the revolution, have their own agenda, and let the Bolivarian system in Venezuela learn from the Peronists the democratic art of leaving power to come back another day. The alternative is leaving in a way that means never coming back.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Future

AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

Journalism teacher and his students in University of Barcelona.

Journalism students at the Blanquerna University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

© Sergi Reboredo via ZUMA press
Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest