October 24, 2007   We comment today on a new report: WHAT IS THE FUTURE of EDUCATION in CUBA? and the answer is nothing of value much at all.

The report notes that Castro's Cuba teaches by television and the "primary objective of education in Cuba is the formation of future revolutionary Communists."
 
The MIAMI HERALD piece is here, and we urge all to review the full report. It is unbearably irresponsible to adopt the Cuban school curricula and methods in the Andes because the content, academic vigor mad political brainwashing is wrong. Just plain wrong for the whole system leaves students unprepared, uneducated and like Cuban serfs- undereducated for much of anything. Contrast this to Chile's upgraded educational reforms which embrace the complexity of today's world to better prepare Chileans both in academic content and technical expertise and you have a heartbreaking situation for Venezuelan and Ecuadorean young people. As adults, they will be unprepared for today's world.
 
This does not need to happen. Parents, students and civil society can reject the Castro-Chavez school plan for Ecuador under Correa.

Each time you are lied to about the benefits of the "free" Cuban educational system, ask yourself WHY it is so great and why it is that Cubans are not prepared to do anything much except serve the state system in low paying servile jobs with no advancement or to distribute Band Aids by the thousands, calling themselves Cuban doctors when they are not. Cubans are not well educated at all.
 
We also remind that the excuse that all deserve universal education, like universal suffrage, is missing in South America is a lie: voting rights, state health care that is "free," and state assured education has been the law in all Latin nations for years. Quality of education, like health care and verifiable voting records, has not been consistent in many regions over the last ten years with state funds misdirected and applied with irregularity, leaving many schools and students underserved due to state budget/political whims.
 
It is one thing to decide as an adult to prefer to be ignorant and chose to be undereducated, which of course leaves one in a particularly irresponsibly impossible condition of actually contributing to the failing status of the whole in our communities, our families and our nations. But it is a dark secret that families that prefer to eave their children uneducated or undereducated risk dooming their children to lives spent inside the self imprisonment of hopelessness and serf-like Cuban lives of misery where all facets are manipulated by the state. Correa and Chavez think this is a good plan for Ecuador. We disagree totally and encourage the vibrancy of better education for all, open and free speech [without which no educational system can thrive] and a rejection of the self imprisoning of the Cuban state system.

Chavez threatens to install the Cuban school curricula for communists in every school- state and private, which includes the large Catholic-parochial school system.
 
Society condemns itself when it enjoys pretending that actually continuing to remain undereducated as adults is a useful standard for our children. By our own laziness and self centeredness, we doom our future generations to failure. The failure to actually lead children to a better life is but one part of the failure of the entire family and state system to build a better nation, one person at a time.
 
Do you really believe that Hugo Chavez's Cuban schools give your children a better chance to succeed in today's competitive world? Is it really so much more beneficial to fail your children and install in their lives a statist/communist series of robotic non humans to simply serve the state but never enjoy the chance to grow and dream?
 
Today no Ecuadorean is welcome internationally because they have nothing to provide, nothing to deliver that is well informed and rarely if ever are honest. Worse yet is that fact that no Ecuadorean actually wants to contribute to the common good at all these days, surrendering to the stubborn position that doing nothing and manipulating living standards is the best course, when it clearly is not. In short, most are -by choice- badly educated, selfish and full of lies and misinformation. They are not welcome because there is no value to their persons either in business or civil society. De facto all Ecuadoreans today wear a sign on their jacket that reads: Beware! A manipulative liar is among you! And that is because we as individuals elevate the manipulative, shady actors and debase the decent actors. This was not always the case. In the Twentieth Century, Ecuador held a unique role for decades as a dependable ally to many nations. Post 1997, commencing with the Bucaram final fiasco-sometimes called the first large scale state backed orgies of criminality- some pockets of Ecuadoreans believe that this is their "right" to abuse state office and with gay abandon self enrich and abuse their high offices. It is a bridge too far and as long as Ecuador refuses to commit to positions of principled leadership, it has no positions of principled leadership and is adrift in its own morass, ripe for totalitarian installations as is the case today.
 
Contrary to what Chavez and Correa tell us all, Cuba is not the answer and it is a miserable place. Ecuador has already suffered a massive Diaspora of over 20% of its peoples following the Mahaud financial collapse of 1998-99. The Diaspora continues. Correa, himself badly educated, thinks this is a good idea and has done nothing to stem the outflow of Ecuadoreans on to the world stage, where they are of course unwelcome and generally doomed to lives of illegal residency and horrifically low paying jobs because they are uneducated and unprepared for the 21st Century.
 
Most Ecuadorean media carried the shocking tale of life for Ecuadorean immigrants in Spain, complete with security video from a Spanish subway. This video showed a young Spanish man capriciously and randomly kicking the daylights out of an innocent passenger in Spain. That victimized young woman, herself an illegal Ecuadorian implant, failed to defend herself in any way even as fellow passengers- also Ecuadorean illegal immigrants, failed to rise to assist her from disgusting bodily harm. No one helped the victim and the victim did nothing to help herself. The violent perp thus far seems to benefit from state prosecution which is neither interested nor active in delivering even handed justice nor protecting human rights for the millions of Ecuadorean aliens in Spain, who are repeatedly reported in human rights reports as especially vicious in refusing human rights to these pathetic illegals.
 
Two points emerge; not only are Ecuadorean illegal aliens themselves pathetic because they are uneducated and doomed to lives of illegal subservience but that Ecuadoreans never had the training nor the tools to experience inside Ecuador the standards/the norms for self defense and self protections under the law.
The Ecuadoreans are unprepared in free countries to act as free people and unprepared to defend themselves, except for the random tire burning protests which of course delivers no substantive results. Worse yet; Ecuadoreans are now trained by birth to never assist one another and run away from the call to simple charity. Spain's response exposes the utterly debased social norms of today's Spain which, like Ecuadoreans, abuses human rights and ignores the basic respect due all humanity. The young lady on the subway had no defense and she had no skills to defend herself even as no one near her, some report were actually Ecuadoreans, came to her defense. Her family has offered no defense and expresses no outrage that their daughter was randomly beaten by this Spanish thug, kicking her and beating her for no reason whatsoever. Both are wrong- severely wrong. Spaniards today are a loutish group of low level persons in general who enjoy the cost benefits of paying substandard wages to substandard Ecuadorean refugees flooding Spain. Ecuadoreans are trained early on to pretend that ignorance and lives of desperation is their sorry state in life because they fail themselves to prepare for life's challenges, always blaming someone or something else for failure. In the Spanish subway attack, there is no question of the guilt of the aggressive young criminal who randomly beat the innocent young lady. It is an outrage. The Spanish legal system reveals its complicity with the criminality of its own citizens to abusing these immigrants, remaining one step away from Hitler's Nazi-fascist youth. 
 
It is easy for us to shine a light to condemn these replicas of Hitler youth in Spain because Spain still has free press and has yet many pockets of principled persons.

This is not the case in the Andes today where routinely Hitler youth squads are daily trained and installed by the Chavez regime. What happened in Spain- which is morally and legally repugnant- is a common occurrence in Venezuela and Ecuador now. Ecuador is the globe's murder capital: Spain is not.
 
Ecuador has no law and order. Ecuador's police and military are utterly bribed by both Correa and Chavez to their current status as paramilitaries on the take....on the make for any Correa-Chavez money making scheme. Ecuador has no rule of law. Correa's Ecuador wants to tell you that Correa is defending human rights by ordering same sex marriages, transvestite rights, homosexual rights and free state birth control and state funded abortions while shuttering parochial schools and ordering Castro-Chavez communist school content and school curricula. We remind that the laws require no abandonment of civil or human rights anyway. But today Ecuador has abandoned basic human and civil rights...the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, including the right to private property and progress, and replaces this with total fascist state controls over every facet of life.
 
What occurred in Spain is an outrage. What the victim suffered- by choice known to all victimized fellow travelers- is an even darker outrage. She suffered because neither she nor her fellow travelers are prepared for any of life's challenges because of the refusal of Ecuadoreans to instill operational approaches for life's challenges. This is no random occurrence.

Do you seriously believe that the police build safe communities in Ecuador? Do you seriously believe that even handed justice can be had in Correa's kangaroo courts? Do you seriously believe that your person and your property are well protected even as crime and murder and rape and torture are now wide spread in Correa's Ecuador? Pay attention to the horrific squads of Chavez's jack booted thugs in Venezuela. They are trained just like Nazi brown shirts were trained by the state to inflict general damage to innocent citizens. Oh- I forgot... Ecuadoreans have chosen to forget to study western civilization and have no clue what happened in the 20th Century, preferring to forget to study WWI and the events leading up to WWII.  Chavez and Castro's goons are busily installing even more revisionism and lies regarding the facts of history. This happens because we let them. And it will happen in Ecuador because we let them. We have not seen one position of principle against the Chavez-Correa school plan from the Ecuadorean church. We can only hope that unlike the business community, which foolishly listened to the lie that if they were silent about Correa's communism and pretended to go along with it, that they would be granted more extensions of US ATPDEA trade benefits. Extortion by manipulation and lies always leads to more crime. We hope the church writ large in Ecuador ceases to sell out its own position and, like the Vichy government of France in the 1940s, enable fascism, turning a blind eye to murder, mayhem and fascist state debaucheries. In so doing, they sell out the very principles for which they stand.
 
Do you know what your children are taught in school? Ask. Get involved. And get busy. No one will "fix" this for you, and you cannot "buy" your way out of this problem. Do you know what Correa and Chavez have planned for your children? The Venezuelans have continually offered to tell all and the Cuban experience is readily available for any with eyes to see. But self professed desire to remain blissfully ignorant leads to this unique moment in time when the fascist state overcomes much because the citizens pretend that blissful ignorance of their own destiny is the better manipulation that the real work of retaining functional lives.
 
You see- it was not just a single Spaniard kicking that poor your lady on the subway the other day. We all have been kicking that poor young lady for years. Her family has been mentally kicking her for so long it feels normal. Her fellow Ecuadoreans have been kicking her for so long that they felt no compelling need to rise up and lift one finger to help as she is mercilessly beaten, pretending that they can manipulate their own laziness by failure to act on moral high grounds. And the state has been kicking Ecuadoreans for so long, pretending also that all Ecuadoreans must be stupid and must be victims of the very system the state demands that the pattern of abuse expands. Every Ecuadorean was present in that subway car the other day. Every Ecuadorean kicked the young Ecuadorean lady and no one- no one came to her defense. It is a mirror of our own societal refusal to stand for principled behavior and is a stunning reflection of a dead nation now.

Soon the zombies of Chavez's state controls will replace this moral dead zone with walking dead...because we let them.
 
Spain will never reform or defend Ecuador. There are no armadas of relief to be coming from the economically and morally declining Spanish socialists, currently propping up their economy on the backs of badly paid immigrants who have no protections and even less pay. There is no future for Ecuadoreans who dream of a better life in Spain: or anywhere in Europe, which is overwhelmed by Muslim overpopulation. Many Muslim Middle Easterners are daily transported to Latin America because there are few job opportunities in their own lands. Just ask the Iranians pouring in to Venezuela- that is, if Chavez allows them to talk. Like the Cubans, they flee the very conditions that Chavez and Correa are selling. There is no way out and nowhere to run to.
 
When was the last time you volunteered to teach basic reading in your local school or community? When was the last time you actually helped a neighbor in need, even if you did not know them or even like them? Sixty percent of Ecuadoreans are in dire need. They need jobs. They need hope. They need training and they need support...not manipulations and not random state hand outs from Chavez-Correa which are political bribes and delivered only in times of political need....need for bribery. And when was the last time you taught your own children about the values of living a life of principles? We know what the answer is. We see it daily when none help the fellow on the corner being shot, we see it even as no one rejects the Chavez-Cuban school plan in Ecuador, we see it when folks are robbed or like in Spain- suffering devastating acts of random violence so vicious that we are outraged. You see it when you look in the mirror.

Be outraged and stand for reform. And remember this: the next time you hear some idiotic liar tell you that the Castro schools are so fabulous, know that this lie has got to stop. There is nothing fabulous out of Cuba, unless you are a criminal. Say no to Correa-Chavez's illicit school take over plans and rebuild the schools not as Hitler youth cults and goon squads but as basic schools for teaching children a sound, reasonable education. The Chavez-Correa plan surpasses Castro's demented statist schools and is instead more correctly identified as paralleling Hitler's youth squads.
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis