Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Madam President, I rise to commend the words of my esteemed colleague, the junior Senator from Florida, who has just spoken powerfully about the threats facing our Nation. On Monday evening he spoke powerfully on the Senate floor about the brutal human rights abuses that have been endemic in communist Cuba over the past 50 years, and the sad reality that Cuba is playing a leading role in the repression of the opposition protests that are currently taking place in Venezuela.

I commend the sentiments of the Senator from Florida, and I offer a few additional thoughts of my own on this important topic.

Brave Venezuelan protesters persist in crowding the streets in Caracas, San Cristobal, Merida, and Valencia despite the detention, torture, and murder of their compatriots in recent days. They are not alone. They have been joined by darker figures, representatives of Hezbollah, Iran, and Cuba, all of whom have a vested interest in propping up the increasingly authoritarian socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro. The appearance of the Iranians, and their Hezbollah agents in Venezuela, is concerning, but it should not be surprising.

Iran has long maintained one of its largest embassies in Caracas, where it has been able to exploit the Venezuelan financial system to evade the international sanctions that--up until a few weeks ago--were placing a real burden on Iran's economy.

Now that the administration has eased the sanctions on Iran, Iran is in a significantly stronger position. Not only have they received the first $500 million in unfrozen assets, but they have also reaped considerable collateral benefit.

Iranian President Rouhani recently tweeted: ``You are witness to how foreign firms are visiting our country; 117 political delegations have come here.''

The Dutch ambassador to Iran tweeted in mid-January that he participated in ``speeddate sessions to meet business[es] interested in Iran.''

China has emerged as Iran's top trading partner with nonoil trade hitting $13 billion over the past 10 months, according to Iranian media.

According to documents seen by Reuters, Iran has signed a deal to sell Iraq arms and ammunition worth $195 million--a move that would break the U.N. embargo on weapons sales by Tehran.

What could a reenriched Iran offer Venezuela, given that the joint plan of action that has enabled this economic detente has done nothing to reverse their nuclear program. The answer is chilling. The longstanding commercial ties between Iran and Venezuela, not to mention their mutual hatred for the United States, raise the specter that should Iran acquire nuclear weapons technology, it might be inclined to share it with Venezuela, which would then act as a surrogate threat to the United States in our own hemisphere.

We need to act immediately to reimpose sanctions on Iran and stand unequivocally against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons capability. I am sorry to say there is one reason--and one reason only--that we have not done so, and that is because the senior Senator from Nevada has been single-handedly blocking the Senate from voting on a bipartisan bill on Iranian sanctions. Given the broad bipartisan support in both Chambers, both the senior Senator from Nevada and the rest of the Democratic leadership need to be held accountable for this obstruction and standing in the way of defending U.S. national security interests and standing in the way of defending our friend and ally, the Nation of Israel.

As alarming as the increasing collaboration is between Iran and Venezuela, there is no country that has a greater stake in preserving the status quo in Venezuela than communist Cuba. Over the 15 years of Hugo Chavez's rule, Venezuela and Cuba have engaged in a mutually parasitic relationship in which Venezuela has exported free oil to Cuba and imported the repressive apparatus of a police state that Raul and Fidel Castro have carefully nurtured other the last 50 years.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, many former Soviet satellites have moved towards freedom and prosperity promised by closer ties to the West--some even joining the historic NATO alliance. But Cuba, tragically, has remained mired in the communist past in no small part because Chavez provided the economic lifeline that sustained the Castro brothers' brutal oppression.

While some hoped that after Raul Castro replaced his brother in 2008, a new era of moderation might dawn, the opposite has occurred. Despite minor cosmetic reforms largely targeted toward beguiling the Western media rather than helping the Cuban people, the Castros have consolidated their control of the island with a significant uptick in human rights abuses.

Last year I had the opportunity to visit and interview two Cuban dissidents to help provide a forum for them to tell their stories. They described the oppression as ``Putinismo.'' That said it was following the strategy of Russia's President Putin, appearing on the outside to make cosmetic reforms while brutally repressing the people at home. That is what is happening in Cuba.

The Castro playbook includes targeting family members of the opposition, brutal attacks and even murder, as well as keeping inexorable control over communications in and out of Cuba.

An American citizen, Alan Gross, was thrown into prison in 2009 for the crime of handing out cell phones to Havana's Jewish population. Alan Gross should be released, and the United States should be calling for Alan Gross's release.

In a tip to the information age, heavy Internet censorship, among the most repressive on the planet, blankets the island to preempt the spontaneous organization facilitated by social media.

First Chavez, and now Maduro, have learned these lessons well under the tutelage of agents from the Cuban intelligence services, and their work has been on grim display during the protests that have taken place this month. The death toll is now at 13, and climbing, as police bullets have taken the lives of not only activists, but of students, innocent bystanders, and even a beauty queen.

Maduro's agents have also borrowed the tried-and-true Castro tradition of summarily detaining opposition leaders, including Leopoldo Lopez who helped organize the protests. But Mr. Lopez's real crime has been to propose an alternative to the socialist catastrophe into which Chavez and Maduro have plunged this once prosperous nation, and to suggest that real economic freedom is the only path out of the rampant inflation and chronic shortages that are making life in Venezuela intolerable.

Recent polling by Gallup reveals a dramatic shift in Venezuelans' attitude toward the economy, as the socialist policies continue to depress growth and to worsen the lives of hard-working Venezuelans. In 2012, just a couple of years ago, 22 percent of the population thought the economy was getting worse and 41 percent thought it was getting better. In 2013, those numbers reversed, with 62 percent believing it was getting worse while only 12 percent believed it was getting better. These numbers suggest there has been a sea change in how the majority of Venezuelans see their situation. These protests are different, and it is little wonder that so many have taken to the streets to demand something better.

America should stand with the protesters. America should stand on the side of freedom. America has a tradition for centuries of presenting a clarion voice for freedom because every heart yearns to be free across the globe, and the United States should unapologetically defend freedom.

Maduro appears to understand the threat of his people demanding freedom, but the unprecedented scale of his crackdown on the protesters has largely been masked from the rest of the world by a heavy veil of Internet and media censorship designed to simultaneously disable the opposition and to mask the scale of their oppression from the outside world. Some ingenious remedies have emerged, including Austin, TX's, own Zello--a direct messaging service that allows members to communicate freely either privately with individuals or over open channels that can support hundreds of thousands of users. Despite the best efforts of the Venezuelan censors to block access to Zello, the company has nimbly developed patches and work-arounds to maintain service to the some 600,000 Venezuelans who have downloaded the app since the protests began.

Zello is a shining example of how we can use our technological advantage to support those fighting for economic and political freedom across the globe, recalling our proud tradition of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. Can my colleagues imagine apps such as Zello spreading to millions of Cubans, to millions of Iranians, to millions of Chinese, providing them the tools to directly speak out for freedom? We have other ways of supporting those advocating for a more free and prosperous Venezuela, such as supporting the sort of liberal economic reforms Mr. Lopez has proposed.

Given the remarkable natural resources Venezuela has enjoyed, it is ridiculous--it is tragic--that the economy has been so mismanaged that citizens face a chronic shortage of basic necessities. But this situation is not inevitable, and the United States is uniquely poised to help. For the United States, Canada, and now Mexico, democratic, market-oriented energy production has been the foundation of what we are beginning to call the American energy renaissance--and there is no reason that Venezuela could not reap these benefits if they reverse the socialist policies that have destroyed their economy.

In this event the United States could help Venezuela reach its full energy potential by offering a bilateral investment treaty that would cover the energy sector. Such an arrangement would protect American companies eager to invest in Venezuela and, at the same time, modernize facilities and increase production of crude--which, I might add, can be refined at the CITGO facilities in Corpus Christi, TX--resulting in gasoline and other refined petroleum products that can be sold on the open market for the benefit of the Venezuelan people, not given to Cuba to prop up the Castros. Which is the better deal for the Venezuelan people: having them receive the benefits of the bounty God has given that country in the open market, receive freedom, receive material blessings, or have instead their oil given to Castro to fuel the repressive policies that are inflicting misery on so many millions?

This is a dangerous and unsettling moment for Venezuela, but it is also a moment of great opportunity. Almost exactly 1 year ago, the Obama administration had a chance to push strongly for reform in Venezuela, when Chavez was on his deathbed. Instead, the Obama administration opted not to rock the boat, in the hopes that Chavez's hand-picked successor would prove more susceptible to diplomatic outreach, that he might not follow Chavez. These hopes are apparently evergreen, as just yesterday a State Department spokeswoman announced that they were open to closer engagement with the Maduro regime, saying: ``We have indicated, and have indicated for months, our openness to develop a more constructive relationship with Venezuela .......''

Negotiating with tyrants and bullies doesn't work. The notion that our State Department could at this moment extend yet another olive branch to Caracas is exactly backward. This is the moment to point out that Maduro's abuse of his fellow citizens is intolerable to the United States; that if he wants better relations with us, he should start by listening to the demands of his own people. He should immediately and unconditionally release Leopoldo Lopez, who is being held as a hostage at the mercy of an authoritarian state. He should lift the cloud of censorship that he is using to isolate Venezuelans from each other and from the rest of the world, and the United States should do all it can to help the people of Venezuela as they choose a different path--a path of freedom and prosperity that will return this one-time enemy to their traditional role of our partner and friend. That is where the Venezuelan people want to be, and it is only their brutal leadership that is preventing it.

This is a time for American leadership to speak in defense of freedom. This is a time for the President of the United States to unequivocally stand against oppression, against totalitarianism, and for the desire of the Venezuelan people to be free and prosperous. That would benefit them, it would benefit us, and it would benefit the world.

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