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Chávez may plan on being
new Castro
By Danna Harman, USA
TODAY, May 23, 2005.
At the invitation of Venezuela's president,
nearly 30,000 Cuban health care workers
and sports instructors have spread out across
Venezuela over the past two years offering
free checkups, medicines and stretching
classes.
In exchange, Hugo Chávez, leader
of the world's fifth-largest oil supplier,
is sending up to 90,000 barrels a day free
to Fidel Castro's communist island.
The deal is the latest sign of where Chávez
wants to take his country - and even the
region. Castro once had hopes of carrying
his socialist revolution across the Spanish-speaking
world, but little money and even less support
among the continent's right-wing leaders
of the 1980s and '90s left him increasingly
isolated.
But Chávez, 50, flush with oil money
and buttressed by a handful of new left-of-center
presidents who have swept into office over
the past several years in South America,
is positioned to wage Castro's crusade against
capitalism and U.S. power more effectively
than "El Jefe" - the chief - ever
could. Chávez is mounting the first
real challenge to U.S. influence in the
region in decades.
"Chávez sees Castro as a father
figure," says Otto Reich, former undersecretary
of State for Latin America in the Bush administration.
When the 78-year-old Castro dies, Chávez
can take over the Cuban's "built-in
network of supporters around the hemisphere,"
says Reich, who calls the Castro-Chávez
relationship an "axis of subversion."
Playing to the poor
The Venezuelan president has called Bush
a "jerk," the U.S. government
a "mafia of assassins" and U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an "illiterate."
In testimony in January before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Rice said the
United States was concerned about Venezuela's
activities beyond its borders.
"We know the difficulty that that
government is causing for its neighbors,"
she said.
Elected in 1998, the former army paratrooper
and leader of an unsuccessful 1992 coup
came to power promising to bridge the huge
gap between the country's rich and poor.
His populist rhetoric - he once described
oil executives as people "living in
chalets performing orgies, drinking whiskey"
- and his promises of revolutionary social
policies played well with the poor, who
helped put him into office.
Chávez's opponents have done their
best to get rid of him - leading street
protests in 2001, orchestrating a short-lived
coup in 2002, mounting a two-month strike
which shut down the country in December
2002, and finally, holding a referendum
on his presidency, which they lost last
August. He won 58% of the vote.
Chávez's critics say his policies
of spending oil wealth to fund social programs
and win popularity will destroy the economy.
"What we should be doing is spending
on infrastructure, creating new jobs, and
giving incentives for private investment,"
says Alfredo Keller, an independent pollster
in Caracas. "But no. Chávez
is instituting 'emergency measures' like
the clinics, which make him popular but
do nothing for our country in the long run."
Chávez now has a 70% approval rating,
according to a Datanalisis poll published
in Caracas this month. That's the highest
rating in five years. The polls shows that
his 13 social "missions" - including
literacy, subsidizing food and issuing identity
cards, on top of the Cuban-run clinics and
sports classes - have added to his popularity.
But Venezuelans seem ambivalent about Chávez's
tight relationship with Castro. Seven out
of 10 respondents to the Datanalisis poll
said they did not support the idea of Venezuela
fully imitating the Cuban-style communist
system.
The government makes no apologies for cozying
up to Castro. "We can ally ourselves
with whomever we want," says Andrés
Izarra, Venezuela's minister of information.
The value of Venezuela's oil shipments
alone to Cuba amounts to more than $1 billion
annually, says economist Carlos Granier
of the Caracas-based Cedice think tank.
Chávez further bolsters the Cuban
economy by purchasing hundreds of millions
of dollars worth of products from Cuba's
state-run industries and helping Cuba buy
Venezuelan products ranging from chocolate
to sardines and work boots. Hundreds more
Cuban-staffed clinics are set to open in
the coming months. More than 1,000 Venezuelans
will be sent to Cuba to study health care
there.
'Hoarding power'
Jorge Dominguez, professor of International
Affairs at Harvard University, says Chávez's
personal relations with Castro and bringing
in Cuban doctors and gym teachers are not
the real concerns. Chávez, says Dominguez,
has an increasingly "authoritarian
disposition," is "hoarding power"
and has embarked on a "gradual but
sure curtailing of political freedom and
freedom of expression."
All this, says Dominguez, and Chávez's
support and even foment of other anti-American
leftist groups elsewhere on the continent,
such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC), are troubling.
Earlier this month, President Bush told
reporters that Venezuela's plans to buy
100,000 assault rifles from Russia for a
32,000-strong army "raises concerns
the guns could fall into the hands of the
FARC." Chávez has denied he
is funding the group.
It is clear though, that the Venezuelan
leaders' imprint on the region is spreading.
Since 2001, left-of-center presidents have
come to power in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia
and Uruguay. While most of these leaders
are wary of Castro, they have generally
embraced Chávez. "The people
of Latin America support him," Evo
Morales, the Bolivian cocoa farmer and opposition
leader said last week. "That is the
new reality."
In her January testimony before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Rice said,
"I think that we have to view at this
point the government of Venezuela as a negative
force in the region."
In San Jose, a poor neighborhood of tin
houses in Caracas, Maria Sanchez, 65, and
Isabel Olivero, 63, are taking a Cuban-run
calisthenics class.
The ladies put their hands in the air and
wiggle their fingers, then squat down and
walk around like ducks.
"Oh dear, so exhausting," gasps
Sanchez, readjusting her hairs pins. "These
Cubans are showing us how to live correctly
- but it takes practice."
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