The Devil's Excrement

In its never ending quest to offer the voters anything, candidate Reina Sequera, the candidate for the Poder Laboral party has made the ultimate populist promise:

“I promise to eliminate the poverty of all Venezuelans. This promise will materialize itself opening a personal bank account and deposit one million US$, amount which we consider should be sufficient for each poor person to get out of material poverty”

There you have it. Hard (Impossible?) to top this. Poverty killed instantly by distributing US$ 26,000,000,000,000 among all Venezuelans. (Please don’t quibble if the population is 26 or 29, or if she will hand out one third at a time, that is round off error). That is 2.6 x 10^13 dollars which will come from”all of the excess of wealth of the minerals that gives us our noble nature, whether you call it oil, iron or gold, etc.”

There you have it Venezuelans. Don’t miss your chance to become a millionaire come October. Elect Reina your President and why not, your Queen. She has over promised anyone and everyone. Never mind the 13 zeroes. Clearly, Hugo was unable to dream beyond dreams. Or beyond his arithmetic.

Go Reina!

Now, Why didn’t I think of this first?

It was another one of those Huguito gifts to the Castro brothers, an undersea optical cable to communicate Venezuela with Cuba in order to improve communications in that island. The cable was quickly laid down by the Chinese contractors and Venezuela’s Minister of Science and Technology, Chavez’ son in law, hailed it as if his office had contributed more than just $68 million dollars or so to purchase it. He said it was “fully operational”. Another triumph of Venezuelan technology, sorry, funding.

But nobody has seen any evidence that it is working.

Something happened with the gift, which so far has apparently not transferred a single byte or bit. Apparently many Cuban Government officials involved in the project have been jailed and the base station purchased to connect to the cable is apparently not compatible with it. There are also charges that both Cuban and Venezuelan officials were involved in some hanky panky with phone cards to call the island.

Thus, another great gift by the autocrat goes to waste, another 70 million or so dollars belonging to Venezuelans goes down the drain. Who cares, really?  We have a pipeline of gizilion dollars coming in every day and Chavez thinks it is unlimited. I just wonder whether the corruption was imported into Cuba or into Venezuela. Maybe this time it was truly a joint project.

Hope the Cuban don’t export their cholera to us next…