Venezuelan exiles can learn from Cuban exiles’ mistakes

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had just rammed through his project to rewrite the country’s constitution and set himself up in a dictatorship, à la Cuba. I had just tweeted about it — and then Troll Jesus accused me, falsely, of being “an earlier supporter of [Hugo] Chávez,” the late founder of the socialist “Chavista” revolution that’s ruled Venezuela since 1999.

“I remember it,” Troll Jesus warned me, apparently aiming for a public shaming.

Though flattered that Troll Jesus remembered my journalism from so far back — you must be pretty old, Troll Jesus! — I replied that, like most correspondents in those days, I had credited Chávez with reducing poverty but criticized him for subverting democracy. To which Troll Jesus shot back, “Like most leftists who always have a soft spot for communist [sic].”

I smiled and thought: Now it starts.

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This story was originally published August 6, 2017 at 3:27 PM with the headline "Venezuelan exiles can learn from Cuban exiles’ mistakes."