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the vice of The “anonymous sources” in the United States war against Venezuela have turned lies into a comfortable and profitable sanctuary. Montaigne warned it well centuries ago: “The deterioration of truth has thousands of aspects and an indefinite field. The Pythagoreans affirm that good is certain and finite; evil, infinite and uncertain.”
I read with astonishment that the problem in convincing Nicolás Maduro to abandon power is that his “Cuban handlers could execute him if he gives in to US pressure and resigns.” The phrase appeared a week ago as a leak in an Axios report (https://l1nq.com/51WRH), attributed to US officials without name or face, and in a matter of hours it was already circulating on portals, social networks and columns as if it were a proven fact.
The conjecture is already a resounding headline: Maduro “could be executed by Cuban spies if he leaves the country”, “The United States believes that Cuba would be willing to assassinate Nicolás Maduro if he tries to escape from Venezuela.” The hypothesis, born in the shadows of an anonymous leak, was presented to public opinion as another piece of geopolitical “realism”, when in reality it had not even surpassed the minimum threshold of verification.
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal (https://l1nq.com/NZs8P) echoes the narrative and repeats that the Venezuelan president “is not entirely the master of his destiny,” because Havana’s allies would condition his political survival. No one remembers that all this comes from the most lying government in the recent history of the United States (it wasn’t the newspaper Granmabut The Washington Post Fact Checker which counted more than 30 thousand false or misleading statements by Donald Trump).
The homicidal fantasy of the “Cuban spies” willing to kill Maduro fulfills several very specific functions. First, it demonizes Cuba and presents its government not only as an “authoritarian regime,” but as a criminal structure capable of eliminating a foreign leader in cold blood. It is no longer just about the old “troika of tyranny” of former security advisor John Bolton to refer to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, but about presenting the Cuban intelligence services as an apparatus of international hitmen.
Secondly, it erases the Venezuelan State: if Maduro is just a hostage of Havana, Venezuelan society, its armed forces and its political actors disappear from the picture, reduced to a troupe of a plot written in another capital. Thirdly, it contributes to creating a feeling of warlike inevitability: if Havana were willing to prevent any resignation “the hard way”, diplomacy would be disavowed from the starting point and political solutions would appear to be naive illusions.
The lie, therefore, is not an isolated outburst, but part of a campaign to consolidate the impression that there are no political paths left and the “hardest” options are inevitable. The coda in this equation is that, after Caracas, the next natural objective would be Havana. The editorial of The Wall Street Journal He even allows himself to fantasize about the possibility that, once a “democratic” government is installed in Venezuela, “the Cuban people would rise up against their dictators,” as if the region were the board of the same sequenced offensive.
Accepting this economy of anonymous leaks means reproducing the same framework that makes it seem reasonable to discuss the overthrow of a foreign government from the deck of a gringo aircraft carrier. Asking who benefits from the dissemination of stories like that of the “Cuban handlers” and demanding proof before elevating them to news status is not a gesture of automatic sympathy towards any government; It should be a minimum defense of the right of people not to see their destiny decided between corridor rumors, psychological operations and editorials of The Wall Street Journal.
It is common sense that in the face of “infinite and uncertain” bad news, as Montaigne suggested, the defense of a verifiable truth is a form of resistance. But we already know that common sense is usually the rarest of goods.
