So, the New York Times has an article on how Venezuelan stores are running out of basic goods, because they import so much, and with the drop in oil prices, they don’t have enough hard currency to buy what they need.
Repeat after me for the 100th time, “all resource booms end.”
All of them. Always. Gold, oil, rubber: it always ends. Period. The question is only when.
Back around 2004, myself and Stirling pointed on the late (and defunct) BOP News that Chavez was screwing up his revolution. That’s not a way of saying I disapprove of his goals, I very much agree with what he was doing in general terms. But in specific, he was not making his country independent of high oil prices.
What a country needs it must either be able to produce, or have product it knows it can sell to someone who can produce what it needs, and who is a reliable partner. (No Western country is a reliable partner to an actual left wing revolutionary government.)
Period.
If you do not, things may go well for a long time, but you are ALWAYS vulnerable to the hegemonic economic state and its allies. Right now that’s the West. For a long time, if the West were jerks to you, you could run to the USSR, but right now there is no complete replacement, though China, as leader of the BRICS, is coming on strong.
Note that when the USSR fell, Russian support for Cuba almost entirely went away.
It was a huge shock, but Cuba survived it.
Chavez was a great friend of Castro’s, but he did not learn from Castro. He did not figure out how his country could survive being cut off from what amounted to essentially it’s only source of support (in his case, oil sales).
Now Venezuelans pay the price.
Learn the lesson.
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