Communism dodges a bullet, for now, and so has Bolsonaro

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Well, with the Cuban communist government on the way out*, and the US at least an election away from its own version, someone has to keep Marxism alive in the western hemisphere, and so the Left will just keep Brazil going for the interim.

HotAir’s Beege Welborn has today’s developments on the Brazilian “election”; the background material below hers is from a draft I was preparing yesterdy and hate to see my efforts go to waste.

Brazil Bug Out: Bolsonaro Bolts for the Border

Things are moving rapidly in the aftermath of the contested Brazilian election, and one of them appears to be the candidate who wound up on the short end of the Lula-engineered polling malarkey - Flávio Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro had been leading in most of the polls after pulling off a surprise win in the first round of the presidential voting, only missing the majority to take the whole thing by the merest fraction. That's what threw the race into a run-off with the incumbent Brazilian president, Lula Da Silva.

The other candidates in the first round had also been right-of-center to Lula's hard left. Everyone expected, especially after they all endorsed Bolsonaro, that most of their voters would still swing to the right.

That's initially how the very close election last Sunday seemed to be heading, until a literal last-second appeal from Lula to extend voting for two additional hours was approved. This was done not by the Superior Electoral Court, which constitutionally has control over all election functions in the country, but by Lula's former personal lawyer, now a Brazilian Supreme Court justice. He sent out the order for the polls to remain open. 

It was timed so badly, perhaps purposefully so, that many of the districts had already closed at the prescribed times, sealed their ballot boxes, and turned off the machines. Those cannot be restarted. Curiously, many Lula strongholds didn't miss a beat and kept votes rolling in. 

As the votes were counted, it was clear that a sea change in the election's direction had taken place precisely when the order came down. The closed polling stations effectively disenfranchised Bolsonaro voters.

…. In his victory speech, Lula laid the groundwork for taking control of social media platforms to roars from the crowd, and his Supreme Court toadie, the creepster who channels an 18th-century vampire, Alexandre de Moraes, gave the high court blessing to a call to confiscate Lula's opponent's passport.

When Flávio Bolsonaro walked out of his seriously ill and under house arrest father's home yesterday, regime thugs were waiting in the street outside to demand he surrender his passport.

*Related:

Cuba's Government Has Collapsed and Cubans Know Who to Blame

The Atlantic published a story today which says the Cuban government has all but collapsed. Officially it still exists, but in most of the country, and even in Havana, there are few signs of its presence.

The Cuban regime has stifled any viable domestic opposition. But the withering of the state—a process that has been under way for decades—has accelerated, and is shocking to see up close. The ration cards that used to guarantee basic foodstuffs for every Cuban had been blank for weeks when I visited in August. Police and soldiers were once ubiquitous throughout the country, but I saw hardly any...

The government still purports—on faded billboards, in party speeches—to meet all of the material and spiritual needs of its citizens, but it is now bankrupt in every sense. Almost no one believes in the system anymore, and many, especially outside Havana, behave as if the government simply does not exist.

The only thing that Cuba's government seems equipped to do at this point is take the blame. Even regular people the author encountered have had enough of communism.

Not long ago, the country bristled with informants working for the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. But when I asked people about the CDR, some laughed, and few seemed worried about being overheard. One evening on a beach in Baracoa, a man in his 30s asked me what I thought about Communism. He was lying in a hammock talking with four other men, drinking cheap sugarcane rum from a plastic bottle; they had been complaining about the ever higher prices of rice, beans, and other basic foods. I told him I thought Communism was a lousy way to run a country.

He looked squarely at me and said, “I shit on Fidel Castro’s mother.” The other men laughed. He uttered a few more obscenities. Then, suddenly, all of the humor drained from the man’s face. His voice went taut with anger, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“Cuba is frozen in time!” he shouted. “There’s no hope. It’s a sad thing to be born a Cuban. That’s what I think, and I don’t care; they can send me to prison if they want.” The other men had gone silent.

Surprisingly, no one is blaming President Trump, not even when prompted to do so.

During nine days of travel around the island, I did not meet a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation...

“I don’t see any change since January,” a retired engineer named Guillermo Almeida told me. “That oil from Venezuela wasn’t reaching the people anyway.”

In Havana he visited a nursing home full of old men who'd once had roles in Cuba's government. One man, age 65, had been a big supporter of the revolution and even had a tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm. But his opinion of communism had changed.

I asked him what should be done to make things better. Cuba needed to be bombed, he told me. Specifically, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, should be bombed. And Raúl’s daughter Mariela. And the prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz.

All that's left now is for something to replace the failed government of Cuba. Last Friday, Secretary of State Rubio encouraged Cubans to partner with the CIA.