Caracas Chronicles

Cuba and the U.S. spent a year and a half secretly negotiating the normalization in their diplomatic relations through a Canadian back-channel. A year. And a half.

Still, when it was announced this morning, the Venezuelan state seemed caught totally off-guard. State media went into deer-in-the-headlights panic mode, defaulting to silence for hours on end while the story made huge global headlines.

All signs point to the Venezuelans being completely out of the loop, to the point that they were still staging anti-gringo, visa-burning mass rallies last weekend!

Think about that, Chavismo just spent a decade bankrolling the dictatorship in Havana and even so when the Cubans make a decision that changes the game, they don’t feel they need to make even a courtesy call to Caracas so they can at least get their public information lines sync’d up. It’s humiliating!

But it’s not just that the Cubans didn’t tell us, it’s that we didn’t find out on our own. Can you think of another piece of intelligence of greater strategic value to the chavista state than this one? And they just missed it?

It’s staggering that SEBIN didn’t know this was coming down the line. Staggering!

Nicolás Maduro can’t fart in bed without a G2 intelligence report landing on a desk somewhere in Havana. But the Castro Brothers can completely reorient Cuba’s entire geostrategic stance after an 18 month negotiation without anyone in Caracas catching wind of it? Really?!

Chamo, I nominate SEBIN for the hotly contested prize of Biggest Waste of Money in Bolivarian Venezuela.