Pepe Jose Mujica says that in Cuba “it seems that there is a turn”
He said that Venezuela is a dictatorship and those regimes are punishing the people.
The former president of Uruguay, José “Pepe” Mujica, said in an interview that in Cuba “it seems that there is a turn”, referring to the dictatorships in Latin America.
In the “Mejor hablar” program, broadcast this Monday by Canal 24 Horas, Mujica avoided calling the Cuban regime a dictatorship.
The former president, who claimed to have held telephone conversations with Miguel Díaz-Canel, when referring to the Cuban political situation, affirmed that in Cuba there is a “slow turn, but it seems that there is a turn” and added that Obama “was well inspired” in his approach to the Caribbean nation.
The 87-year-old man told journalist Matías del Río – when asked about dictatorships – that Nicolás Maduro “overturned Chavismo” and described him as a dictator.
According to Mujica, Venezuela is a dictatorship and those regimes are punishing the people, an argument that he had used years ago when talking about that country.
“The dictators are laughing, the ones who punish the peoples,” he pronounced in the interview offered at his house.
In a clear allusion to the embargo and the United States measures against Venezuela, he ruled that economic sanctions only cause hunger to the people, not to the rulers.
“Dictators eat well every day and nothing happens to them and those who are affected are the people,” he said.
For the former Uruguayan president, “We Latin Americans have not been able to build a nation, we invented many countries and we do not exist in the world.”
At another point in the interview, he also added that a monarchical idea of power persists in the world. In his opinion, the president is the most representative of a team and he described the figure of the ruler as that of a fire colonel “because he is a fire extinguisher.”
On the other hand, when addressing the current context in Russia, he expressed that the measures imposed on that country were nonsense on the part of Europe for not having negotiated at the right time.
In an interview for the “Salvados” program on the Spanish channel La Sexta, José Mujica recounted a few years ago that Obama asked him to worry about an American prisoner in Cuba (Alan Gross) and that he helped in the rapprochement between Washington and Havana.
Pepe also confessed that during a good part of his youth he lived “in support of the Cuban Revolution and that the Cuban people are very loved,” but that he had another vision of the construction of socialism.
“With what has happened in history, with what happened with the Soviet bureaucracy, one draws conclusions” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat of course” because “the proletariat ends up having nothing and the dictatorship a lot” and also “gives the impression that a new class is emerging, which is the bureaucracy”.
Mujica, from the Broad Front party, resigned in 2020 from his place in the Senate to avoid a probable contagion of Covid-19 and abandoned party politics.
“Honestly, I’m leaving because the pandemic is throwing me out,” Mujica said in his last speech after 26 years of first entering parliament and after having acquired international notoriety that led him to be the protagonist of dozens of books and films, promoting transformative legal reforms such as equal marriage, the decriminalization of abortion or the regulation of the marijuana market.
