Magaldi Téllez

They will tell you Mao’s China was isolated and paranoid and turned inward in ways that impoverished its people. They will not tell you that the isolation was substantially enforced from outside. American-led embargo. Exclusion from the United Nations until 1971. Diplomatic non-recognition. The systematic attempt to strangle an economy of 600 million people because their government had been chosen without American approval. When the isolation produced poverty, the poverty was cited as evidence of communism’s failure. The embargo that enforced the isolation was not cited at all. This is the same logic applied to Cuba, to Vietnam, to Iran, to the DPRK. Impose the conditions that make development difficult. Point to the difficulty as proof that the political system doesn’t work. Use that proof to justify maintaining the conditions. It is a clean loop. It requires only that the people inside it never look at what’s producing what.

1/8 Existe el mito de que antes de 1999 Venezuela tenía un sector privado altamente competitivo que garantizaba el bienestar social. Al revisar la historia económica del siglo XX, la realidad muestra un capitalismo asistido cuyas fallas terminaron en una grave crisis social.