By Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Wall Street Journal
On Wednesday, as Venezuelan strongman Nicólas Maduro was promising more repression to crush relentless student protests, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told reporters that Moscow plans to put military bases in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. A few days later a Russian spy ship arrived in Havana harbor unannounced.
The usual Cold War suspects are back. More accurately, they never left. Former KGB officer Vladimir Putin is warning President Obama that Russia can make trouble in the Americas if the U.S. insists on solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Meanwhile, Latin America’s aging Marxists are lining up behind Mr. Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez.
Russia and Cuba are finally reaping the benefits of the revolution they have long sown in Latin America. Any chance of defeating them requires setting the record straight about how Venezuela got so poor.
Venezuelan politicians sold left-wing populism like snake oil for decades before Chávez came to power in 1999. They demagogued entrepreneurs and indoctrinated the masses with anti-businesses propaganda. From the earliest days of the Cuban revolution, Castro was a hero in Venezuelan universities where Cuban-Soviet propaganda flourished. By the 1960s school children were being weaned on utopian collectivism. The brainwashing intensified when Chávez opened Venezuela to Cuban proselytizers.
Through it all, the politically connected got rich, including the chavistas. But today a large part of the population believes that business is underhanded and greedy. This is why escaping the noose of totalitarianism is going to be difficult. The culture of liberty has been nearly annihilated, and even if Mr. Maduro is overthrown, that culture must be rebuilt from the ground up.
To be sure, social media makes it harder to put a smiley face on tyranny than in the 1980s. Back then a doctrine like sandinismo could be marketed by Cuba and Russia to naïve Americans as the salvation of the Nicaraguan poor even while the Sandinista army burned Miskito Indian villages and arrested banana-selling peasants as speculators in the highlands.
Today word gets around. A Feb. 18 cellphone image from the Venezuelan city of Valencia—of a young man carrying the limp body of 22-year-old Genesis Carmona after she was shot in the head by Maduro enforcers—has gone viral as an emblem of the repression.
Story continues here: The Roots of Venezuela’s Disorder: Russia and Cuba are Reaping What They’ve Sown in Latin America
Cuba Confidential 
All this crisis would have been avoided if our presidents would have adopted a more aggressive stand against Cuba and Venezuela.as soon as Chavez took power and he was known to support guerrilla and he began to incite unrest in South America,he should have been dealt with,When Castro began to murdered people in 1959 and he declared himself a Marxist Leninist,he should needed to be overthrown,specially during the Bay of Pigs.What we are experiencing now are the fruits of bad policy in part of our administrations.Putin should be treated for what he is a thug,we must remember that before he was a KGB operative in Bremen,he was a hoodlum which was raised in a project building.We should know the attributes of a criminal before we are ready to face one.The attributes of a criminal are the following,violent,speculative,arrogant
knowledgeable of the victim he is ready to attack and hypocritical.Putin is not a world leader,he is simply a THUG.Whatever
is going on in the world right now in Latin America is the result of Bad policy and appeasement.
The minute Cuba began to interfere in Venezuelan sovereignty,the Cubans should have been stopped.Our administrations
have adopted a very passive stance to Cuba and Venezuela,we have let them run rampant and to subvert the rest of the continent,Now if Putin put bases in Cuba and Venezuela,our military should put the missile shield in Poland and the rest of Europe and let’s see how Putin is going to like that.