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Not
even Castro defends Chávez
By Carlos Alberto Montaner,
www.firmaspress.com. Posted on Mon, Dec.
08, 2003 in The
Miami Herald.
It appears that this time Venezuelans are
going to put Hugo Chávez out on the
street. The work of the Democratic Coordinating
Committee has been magnificent. The opposition
democrats needed 2.4 million signatures
to request a referendum to revoke the president's
mandate; they collected 3.6 million.
After the sovereign people are consulted,
Chávez presumably will leave power
along with 27 legislators out of 33 who
remained faithful to him. This is a smashing
blow that delegitimizes the Chávez
administration and his chaotic "Bolivarian
revolution.''
The proof of this tremendous impact on
the ranks of power was the reaction essayed
by Chávez, Vice President José
Vicente Rangel and Infrastructure Minister
Diosdado Cabello. Right after the gathering
of signatures ended, the top leaders proclaimed
that the exercise had been a failure because
barely two million signatures had been collected.
A few hours later, aware that they couldn't
keep up that charade under the watchful
eye of international observers, they pulled
out of their sleeves a purported ''mega-
fraud,'' a statement that not even Granma,
the official newspaper of the Communist
Party of Cuba, has dared to defend.
Why the lack of enthusiasm by the Cuban
government toward Chávez after the
recall signatures were gathered? According
to some not-so-secret analyses by Castro's
intelligence services -- including the opinion
of the Cuban ambassador in Caracas, and
if we are to believe the latest defectors
(one of them, journalist Uberto Mario Hernández,
who refers to the Chávez echelon
as an assemblage of drug addicts and cretins)
-- Chávez is a loquacious and bizarre
madman surrounded by people who are exceptionally
incompetent.
A not-so-good revolutionary
These are people with whom you can set
up a gambling den, a bawdy house or a dominoes
tournament, but not a drastic and rigorous
revolution in the Leninist fashion, with
firing squads, dungeons and obligatory silence.
The Cubans would have preferred Rangel,
an unscrupulous Stalinist, a survivor of
the Cold War. But history saddled them with
''Crazy Hugo,'' as they call Chávez
in private.
Castro knew this and warned Chávez:
You can't impose a dictatorship as long
as there's a free press. Of course, Castro
didn't say, ''impose a dictatorship.'' He
uses words cautiously. He said, ''make a
revolution,'' but the communication codes
were obvious.
Revolutions are ugly affairs. You have
to make them in the dark and by dint of
the whip. What a shame that, in more than
three years of government, only a few dozen
covert murders were committed and 95 percent
of the media remains in the hands of a bourgeoisie
that kowtows to the United States. That's
no way to do it.
In Cuba almost half a century ago, a few
months before the nation's leaders joined
the glorious socialist camp, they cranked
up the firing squads, confiscated the media
and jailed or exiled a good number of journalists.
After that, life was a piece of cake.
Chávez defends himself as best he
can from these charges of revolutionary
incompetence, or ''pussyfooting,'' as Cuban
Col. Lázaro Barredo -- a policeman
who pretends to be a journalist -- likes
to say.
Of course, Chávez would love to
shoot at dawn 400 Venezuelan enemies of
the people. How could anyone question his
Leninist instincts? Didn't he leave some
500 lifeless bodies on the streets during
his raid on Miraflores Palace in 1992? The
problem is that he's impotent. He has no
strength. His enemies do not fear him.
He also does not enjoy the trust of his
own army. His political party, the Fifth
Republic Movement, is a sack filled with
scrawny cats. His legislators lack experience.
Three quarters of the power structure devote
themselves to plundering the public treasury.
Chávez would have loved to cancel
the ''re-signing,'' but how could he do
it with such a weak government? Nobody would
have joined him in that adventure, not César
Gaviria (head of the Organization of American
States) or former President Jimmy Carter.
In fact, not even President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva of Brazil, who has indicated
that the legalities must be observed.
Milk the Bolivarian cow
Castro, who is a realist and used to failures
on the international scene, is gearing up
for the worst of all possible news: Chávez's
departure from power four months from now.
To this end, Castro's orders are clear:
Milk the Bolivarian cow down to the last
drop of oil.
Instead of receiving 53,000 barrels of
crude per day, Castro seems to be receiving
70,000 -- a bit more than one third the
amount that the island consumes. He will
try to raise the number to 100,000. He will
take all he can, even the ashtrays.
Simultaneously, Castro's agents are reviving
old contacts with Venezuela's Marxist left,
which, paradoxically, opposes Chávez.
Castro's message sotto voce is: ''Chávez
has been a disappointing failure, but that
doesn't invalidate our revolutionary project.''
Obviously, even after his incompetent ally
has left office, Castro will try to hold
on to Venezuela's oil subsidy, but he won't
be able to.
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