by Gary Alexander
June 16, 2026
As we approach our nation’s 250th birthday – 18-days from now – it may be time to ask why so few other nations adopted our winning approach. Why not Declare your own Independence, fight for it (if tyrants don’t surrender), then copy our Constitution – minus its obvious flaws – and emulate our success story?
Outside of tiny San Marino (with just 24-square miles), the USA is the world’s oldest representative constitutional government in existence today. Our Constitution took effect in 1789, the same year the French stormed the Bastille, seeking freedom, but France ended up with a Reign of Terror, including massive guillotine executions, then a worthless currency and a squat little military dictator from Corsica taking over the nation within a decade. In our first decade, by contrast, we had a Whiskey Rebellion in which President George Washington defeated, then forgave, all the miscreants. (In the same decade, in 1798, Haiti staged a revolution from European control, and yet they remain dirt poor, 228-years later).
In the same year our Declaration of Independence was drafted, Adam Smith published “Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations.” Taken together with Tom Paine’s “Common Sense,” these major 1776 masterpieces still provide a road map to national health and individual wealth, so why do so few nations follow them?
In 2024, I retired from my regular conference stage jobs – MC at the New Orleans Investment Conference and panel moderator at FreedomFest (usually in Las Vegas) – but I plan to come out of retirement one more time to partake in a celebration of our July 1776 national birthday at this year’s FreedomFest (July 8-11), where I play John Adams once again, in a re-enactment of our nation’s birth (more on that later).
In that conference, I will also moderate two or three film panels, since I have been one of the founding judges (now “Senior Judge”) of the Anthem Film Festival, created and led by Jo Ann Skousen, wife of FreedomFest director, Mark Skousen. She selects films based on quality and a freedom theme and here are four films I’d like to summarize as case studies in the search for national health and personal wealth – two once-wealthy socialist basket cases in our hemisphere, and two recovering socialist nations abroad.
Millions Flee Cuba and Venezuela – At Great Danger – Seeking Freedom
The first two films (pictured above) cover massive migration out of Cuba and Venezuela recently.
In the last five-years, Cuba has lost at least 1.2-million citizens (out of barely 10-million population), due to a crackdown after massive street demonstrations for freedom on July 11, 2021. Cuba’s new dictators (no better than Fidel Castro) threw thousands in jail for very long prison terms and threatened others if they did not remain silent. This July 11, on the final night of this FreedomFest, we present various film awards, and it would be ironic if “Cuba’s Eternal Night” wins – on the fifth anniversary of July 11, 2021.
The most poignant story in this film is that of Ariadna Mena Rubio and her husband Enrique on their incredibly long and hard journey, starting with a flight to Surinam, then mostly hiking across a dozen nations to reach America. (The roughest patch was 50-miles of the Darien Gap entering Panama, with no roads). Now, they happily share with us the amazing freedom of speech and riches in America – at a time when so many native-born Americans can only complain about the division of wealth or political issues.
Adriana’s Long March is typical of a million others, as Cuba lost 1.2 to 1.4-million citizens after the 2021 revolt. Filmed mostly inside Cuba (by brave directors and camera operators), “Cuba’s Eternal Night” follows Ariadna and four other families over the last five-years as they struggle with scarcity of food and medicine leading to the biggest mass exodus Cuba has ever experienced – barely covered in our news.
I’m old enough to recall the day Castro took over Cuba on January 1, 1959. After our Christmas break (in 8th grade at Puget Sound Junior High, Seattle), we kids were excited and hopeful for freedom in Cuba, but our wise teacher, Miss Perry, said, “Let’s wait a while to see how things turn out there.” Wise counsel, as Fidel Castro quickly turned toward the Soviet Union for help and then began persecuting his own people.
Since this is an economic column, I want to give some time to national GDP figures among these four-nations. The official economic situation in Cuba is anemic, with a net decline of 7% in GDP since 2015:
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Venezuela provides an even more dramatic tale, as an estimated 7.9-million Venezuelans have left that country in the last decade, especially after high inflation and famine accelerated in 2015, under the new President Nicolas Maduro – who made his predecessor Hugo Chavez seem like a friendly old Santa Claus. The loss of nearly eight-million Venezuelans in a decade represents roughly 23% of the population, which makes their exodus one of the largest global dispersion and refugee crises in modern history.
This exodus is all the more amazing since Venezuela was once one of the richest countries in the world. It was even the richest nation in South America at one point, controlling the largest fossil fuel reserves of any nation on earth – making it (temporarily) the Saudi (literally “good fortune”) Arabia of the Americas.
Then, Venezuela suffered the first of its socialist takeovers under Carlos Andrés Pérez, president of Venezuela from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1993. He nationalized the oil industry in 1976, and Venezuela began to suffer under his control before Hugo Chavez came in to blame poverty and famine on capitalists, not socialists. This began one of the worst economic collapses ever suffered in peacetime.
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Like the Cuba film, above, “Escaping Venezuela” focuses on the fate of one family, led by a businessman father, Carlos Mora, imprisoned and tortured for 45-days before negotiating a path out of the nation he loves. It took a while for his family to be reunited in America, but that made for a touching film finale.
Syria and Sweden Go on a Roller Coast Ride Toward Freedom
Cuba and Venezuela are long documentaries (over an hour each), while the Syria and Sweden films are shorter (16 and 36-minutes, respectively). They are also much more interested in historical perspectives, based on comparative financial prosperity (or relative poverty) in their past, going back a century or more.
Syria sported a fairly sound economy and stable political structure until Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of Egypt in the 1950s, soon exporting his brand of tyrannical socialism into neighbor nations, including Syria. Then, for more than half a century, the Assad regime strangled Syria — silencing dissent, attacking business owners and driving millions into exile. From 2011 to 2016, a national civil war destroyed the economy and drove millions of Syrians out of that relatively small nation.
In those five-years, around five million Syrians migrated to other nearby countries, seeking asylum. Nearly one-million fled to Europe in the 2015–2016 migrant wave alone, and about four-million Syrian refugees fled to neighboring countries, such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s lead refugee agency. Some are now returning. “Free Syria: Syria’s Economic Renewal” focuses on Mazen Derawan, a Syrian American entrepreneur returning to Damascus.
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
The Assad regime was overthrown in December 2024, and this film starts reporting on homecomings in January 2025, just a month after the collapse of the Assad dictatorship. This is a case where I’d recall my 8th grade Social Studies teacher, Miss Perry, saying “wait and see” a bit before feeling secure about Syria.
Unlike the other three-nations profiled here, Sweden is still a great place to visit – and to end this film survey with a real success story. For decades, Sweden has been held up by the soft socialists in America as the ideal “mixed” (-up) economy, half socialist, half capitalist – or so say Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and New York City major Zohran Mamdani. They laud the Scandinavian model, especially Sweden, for their nationalized healthcare and generous welfare programs funded by a super-high tax rate.
On a closer look, however, Sweden’s socialist phase lasted barely 25-years, and, in the process, Sweden drove its richest and most creative citizens and companies abroad, seeking more tax-friendly lands.
According to the creators of “What Sweden Got Right” (and others didn’t), Sweden was one of Europe’s poorest countries in the mid-1800s, when the economy was rescued by pro-market reforms with lower taxes and open trade, making Sweden one of the world’s richest nations by the mid-20th century.
That bred complacency. In the radicalized 1960s and 1970s, when Keynesian economics and bigger governments charmed way too many politicians and voters, worldwide, Sweden experimented with radical social programs, including sky-high taxes, massive welfare expansion, and heavy regulation.
Sweden’s economy stagnated under socialism, amidst soaring inflation, and a devastating financial crisis in the early 1990s, nearly bankrupting the country. In this film, as in previous Anthem Film Festival entries (about Vietnam and Poland). German economist Rainer Zitelmann and Polish director Tomasz Agencki traced Sweden’s dramatic rise and fall and resurrection – all in the last century, a fascinating tale.
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
And now, for something totally different. FreedomFest organizers – Mark and Jo Ann Skousen and their family – have decided to repeat parts of our previous skit on the creation of Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration, with Dr. Skousen as Ben Franklin and Steve Forbes playing General George Washington. I’ll play John Adams. In this skit, I offer a song on how Adams could have written a better Declaration–of book length.
Come join us: Here are two photographs from two previous FreedomFest Follies, from 2010 and 2014:
All content above represents the opinion of Gary Alexander of Navellier & Associates, Inc.
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Global Mail by Ivan Martchev
This Market Looks Like a “Best-Case Scenario”
Sector Spotlight by Jason Bodner
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About The Author
Gary Alexander
SENIOR EDITOR
Gary Alexander has been Senior Writer at Navellier since 2009. He edits Navellier’s weekly Marketmail and writes a weekly Growth Mail column, in which he uses market history to support the case for growth stocks. For the previous 20-years before joining Navellier, he was Senior Executive Editor at InvestorPlace Media (formerly Phillips Publishing), where he worked with several leading investment analysts, including Louis Navellier (since 1997), helping launch Louis Navellier’s Blue Chip Growth and Global Growth newsletters.
Prior to that, Gary edited Wealth Magazine and Gold Newsletter and wrote various investment research reports for Jefferson Financial in New Orleans in the 1980s. He began his financial newsletter career with KCI Communications in 1980, where he served as consulting editor for Personal Finance newsletter while serving as general manager of KCI’s Alexandria House book division. Before that, he covered the economics beat for news magazines. All content of “Growth Mail” represents the opinion of Gary Alexander
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