Ecuador's Lenin Moreno will soon go to the undignified dustbin of regional presidents, along with former U.S. President Donald Trump. 

Cuban journalist Pedro Martinez Pirez recently shared his experience after meeting him in Quito, on July 3, 2009 when Moreno still served as vice-president for Rafael Correa’s government.  They were at the wake held that day in the courtyard of Oswaldo Guayasamín’s house to bid farewell to the great Ecuadorian narrator and poet Jorge Enrique Adoum, who died in Quito at the age of 83.

Adoum's remains were placed that day next to those of the Ibero-America’s Painter, just as requested, in the roots of the Tree of Life, a pine tree planted by Guayasamin himself in the backyard of his home in Quito, very close to the Chapel of Man, which had been inaugurated with the presence of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez on November 29, 2002.

The funeral for Adoum was very moving.  His friends called him "The Turk", recalled Pirez.  It was attended by the then president Rafael Correa, who on that occasion sang "Vasija de Barro", considered the unofficial anthem of Ecuador, and was loudly song by the attendees to the unique funeral ceremony of one of the authors of that Ecuadorian song.

Pirez describes the ceremony as unforgettable, since they we were saying goodbye to the winner of the First Prize for Poetry of the Casa de las Americas Contests, and to a great Ecuadorian intellectual, Guayasamin's biographer, who had received from the hands of Commander Fidel Castro, in 1989, at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana, Cuba’s highest cultural distinction.

And these are Pirez memories of Moreno, Correa’s dark shadow.  But few could have guessed then the magnitude of his betrayal, the actions that would lead him to the presidency of the Republic of Ecuador eight years later.

Correa, was brave enough to close the U.S. military base in Manta; to disregard the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena de Indias because Cuba had been excluded from the forum; to promote Manuelita Saenz, the Liberator of the Liberator, to the rank of General; to be the main speaker at the ceremony on January 8, 2009 for the 50th anniversary of Fidel's entry into Havana at the head of the Caravan of Freedom; and to express, five years ago, the most lucid and warmest words at the ceremony held at the Revolution Square in Havana to bid farewell to Commander Fidel Castro.

The four-year term of the Moreno administration dishonored Ecuador.  It destroyed all Correa's achievements.  He subordinated himself to Washington and OAS policies, threw out Cuban medical cooperation in Ecuador, expelled Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and placed himself together with the most despised presidents of Latin America and the Caribbean in the settlement of the bases of integration in our region.

That is why in the elections of this Sunday, February 7 in Ecuador, like those of last November 3 in the United States, the significant thing has not been who won the ballots to return decency to those countries, but who would go to the dustbin of the most heinous presidents of America, where Donald Trump now cheerfully welcomes his loyal subordinate Lenin Moreno.