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Developing countries take aim at US in Non-Aligned meet in Cuba

Michael Langan.

HAVANA, 16 (AFP) - Developing-country leaders in the Non-Aligned Movement put finishing touches on initiatives aimed at countering US might, capping a summit in Havana that an ailing Fidel Castro sat out.

Heads of state and government from more than 55 countries and delegates from a total of 118 were due to adopt a voluminous final declaration backing Iran's right to nuclear energy; urging UN reform to achieve greater weight for poor countries; and opposing what they see as US interventionism.

The proposed document also condemns what it terms Israel's "unlawful" policies in the Palestinian territories and its recent military intervention in Lebanon.

On Friday, leaders of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries met without Cuba's communist leader Fidel Castro, whose convalescence kept him away from the spotlight he has enjoyed for almost five decades.

"Doctors insisted that he continues his rest," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said at the opening of the summit, adding that Castro's brother Raul would represent Cuba at the gathering Saturday.

Raul Castro, 75, long Cuba's defense chief, officially heads Cuba while his bearded sibling recovers from gastrointestinal surgery he underwent in July. "Once he is fully capable of resuming his duties, Fidel will be the chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement," Perez Roque said.

Among the prominent leaders speaking at the two-day summit was Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who insisted Tehran's controversial atomic program had strictly peaceful objectives, and claimed the United States was the real nuclear threat.

"Why should people live under the nuclear threat of the United States?" he asked at the summit Friday.

"What is the UN Security Council waiting for to react to those threats?"

He urged his counterparts to help "counter attempts to prevent Iran from developing its peaceful nuclear activity." Washington is pushing for sanctions to force Tehran to stop producing enriched uranium, which can be used both for nuclear power and for atomic weapons.

Raul Castro, and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, also delivered blistering condemnations of the United States, while Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for "moderation, harmony and reason."

North Korea meanwhile charged that the United States left it no option but to secure nuclear arms as a deterrent, and pledged that as long as it was hit by US sanctions it would not be back in talks.

"Our country will never return to the talks under US sanctions," Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, told the summit.

The representative of the Stalinist regime, outside the context of its usual relative isolation, slammed the United States as a "serious threat to world peace and security."

An ailing Fidel Castro late Friday greeted Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, on the sidelines of the summit, Cuban state media reported Saturday.

On the sidelines of the summit, a pyjama-clad Fidel Castro also has met in a hospital-like room at an undisclosed location with Argentine lawmaker Miguel Bonasso, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The next NAM summit will be held in 2009 in Egypt, Raul Castro said.

Fidel Castro meets leaders of Iran, India, Ecuador

HAVANA, 18 (AFP) - An ailing Fidel Castro met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Ecuadoran President Alfredo Palacio on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana, Cuban state media and diplomatic sources said.

At the Saturday meeting Castro and Ahmadinejad discussed "Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy" and the "positive results" of the summit, according to the daily Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth).

The summit concluded Sunday with a final declaration backing Iran's right to nuclear energy and urging UN reform to give greater weight to poor countries.

At a separate "fraternal encounter" Saturday, Castro and India's Singh discussed the summit results, important global events, and the "excellent relations" between Cuba and India, according to Juventud Rebelde.

On the sidelines of the summit, Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf agreed at breakthrough talks to resume negotiations on the disputed Kashmir region and to jointly battle terrorism.

On Sunday Castro met with Ecuador's Palacio and two cabinet officials for nearly an hour, Palacio's spokesman told AFP.

Castro, 80, is recovering from intestinal surgery. On July 31 he temporarily ceded power to his brother Raul, 75, long Cuba's defense chief.

Ahmadinejad, Singh and Palacio were among more than 55 heads of state and government at the meeting of the movement of 118 developing countries held in Havana which was presided over by Raul Castro.

During the week-long summit, Fidel Castro also met with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; presidents Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, as well as Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Argentine legislator Miguel Bonasso.

Chavez goes to visit 'Quixotic' Castro

By Anita Snow, Associated Press Writer. September 14, 2006.

HAVANA - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he was going straight to Fidel Castro's side after arriving Thursday in Cuba for the Nonaligned Movement summit, and that the Cuban leader's recovery from intestinal surgery has been remarkable.

"If you saw Fidel riding a horse here, you would think he's the Man from La Mancha," Chavez said. "Fidel has always been a Quixotic figure. But this Don Quixote is victorious and invincible."

Chavez also said that with his close friend in charge, the group representing two-thirds of the world's nations will be much stronger. Cuba takes over the three-year chairmanship of the movement from Malaysia this week.

Castro made an appearance of sorts on the summit's sidelines when state television showed photos of him chatting with an old friend, Argentine congressman Miguel Bonasso, in Castro's home in Havana. Bonasso described Castro as much improved in a first-person article about their encounter in the Pagina/12 newspaper Thursday.

"It may sound incredible, but Fidel was as lucid and penetrating as ever," Bonasso wrote.

Castro praised Chavez as a world leader who is making major changes to benefit his people in a democratic way, Bonasso said. "Chavez has been creating an indestructible model. He does not represent an extreme form of socialism, but a realistic one," he quoted Castro as saying.

Chavez has already met with Castro three times since the 80-year-old Cuban leader announced on July 31 that he had undergone intestinal surgery and was temporarily ceding power to his 75-year-old brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro.

Bolivian President Evo Morales also arrived early Thursday, joining an array of U.S. critics whose appearances in Cuba were expected to shape a contentious debate at next week's U.N. General Assembly session over Iran's nuclear ambitions and Venezuela's efforts to join the Security Council.

The summit also has provided a fresh look at the collective leadership that has emerged during Fidel Castro's recovery. Raul has taken on his brother's protocol role, meeting with the leaders of Malaysia, Algeria, Vietnam, while several other top Cuban officials have given forceful speeches.

Also on the sidelines, the Group of 15 developing nations was convening Thursday. Initially set up to foster cooperation with international groups such as the World Trade Organization, the G-15 has since grown to include 18 members: Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

One country that won't take part is the United States, which declined an invitation to attend as an observer. A press officer at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana said they wouldn't comment on any matters discussed at the summit.

Still, the policies of President Bush have come up repeatedly. Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon accused the U.S. of breaking its own pledge to fight terrorism by harboring Luis Posada Carriles, former CIA operative and militant Castro foe wanted in Venezuela for the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people.

"George W. Bush has said it, the White House said it: 'States that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists," Alarcon said. "Then I ask, why does a federal judge decide that Posada Carriles can be set free?"

Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage also singled out the United States as he exhorted the movement to use peace and cooperation to achieve its goals.

"Amid wars and threats of more wars, the world in which we live is each day more unjust and unequal," Lage said. "The end of the East-West confrontation was not the beginning of the peace that many of us dreamed of. ... The real history has been that of a growing dominance of a nation that is unscrupulously exercising economic and political pressures."

The Nonaligned Movement developed during the Cold War as an alternative in a world divided by the United States and Soviet Union, and grows to 118 members this week with the addition of the Caribbean states of Haiti and St. Kitts.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will attend as an observer, and also was expected to meet personally with Fidel Castro before returning to New York for the U.N. assembly.

Others attending include Presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, as well as Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh of India and Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand. North Korea said it is sending its No. 2, parliament leader Kim Yong Nam.

China Seizes Opportunity at Cuba Summit

By Olga R. Rodriguez, Associated Press Writer.

HAVANA, 14 sep (AP) -- China hopes to expand its growing economic and political clout at the Nonaligned Movement summit, influence that analysts say will come at the expense of the United States, which passed up a similar invitation to attend as an observer.

Led by China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi, the Chinese delegation plans to hold bilateral meetings with a number of Latin American countries and strengthen China's ties to the region where its trade has soared. China's imports from Latin America quintupled to $20.3 billion and exports to the region tripled to $15.4 billion from 2000 to 2004, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The administration of President George W. Bush has declined to attend the summit, and a press officer at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana said it wouldn't comment on the Nonaligned Movement.

That's a mistake, according to Latin America analysts who have tracked declining U.S. influence in a region where it can no longer count on the unconditional support of political leaders, even though U.S. trade remains the most powerful engine for their economies.

"Bush likes to use the saying 'You're either with us or against us' and they are writing off the summit because they are non-aligned, which to them means they are not with the U.S.," said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

The United States is wary of the region's more leftist governments, some of which have openly opposed Washington's economic prescriptions of economic growth through austerity measures, free trade deals and privatization. The region's economies have largely stabilized -- hyperinflation and crippling debts are mostly history. But poverty and unemployment remain huge problems, and many Latin Americans feel the Washington model failed to improve their lives.

Some analysts say the U.S. is out of touch, still trying to impose trade agreements that will make life even more difficult for the poor while raising the rhetoric about the dangers of populism in Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries.

Earlier this year, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compared Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Adolf Hitler, and Bush worried publicly about the leadership of Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Chavez's response was telling: At an event with Fidel Castro in Havana in February, he noted the waning U.S. influence in the region and echoed Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong's idea that capitalist countries were "paper tigers" to be challenged.

China paid little attention to Latin America until recently, and its commerce with the region still represents less than one percent of its collosal foreign trade, according to a Harvard University study commissioned by Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research center. But now China is booming and looking to Latin America for the raw materials it needs to support its growth, and for new markets to sell to.

And unlike the United States, which often uses trade deals as political leverage, China has avoided political meddling, said Weisbrot, who predicts that U.S. commerce may have already peaked as a share of Latin America's economies, while their trade with China will grow substantially.

China, whose domestic consumption is expected to grow by $1.3 trillion in the next decade, is increasingly seen by the world's developing nations as both a source of investment and a mammoth emerging market.

China mainly exports machinery, televisions, computers and automobiles to Latin America. In exchange, it buys about 30 percent of its agricultural imports (mostly soy beans) from Argentina and Brazil, China's largest trading partner in the region, and is one of the top buyers of Chilean copper.

While some Chinese products such as textiles and electronics have made it difficult for some Latin American industries to compete, Chinese investments have made it easier for Argentina, Brazil and other countries to buy political independence with early payoffs of their national debts.

"(The U.S. is) refusing to acknowledge the changes that are taking place in Latin America," Weisbrot said. "That's why they are losing influence so rapidly."

While the relationship is purely economic for most developing countries, Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela see China as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony.

Relations between Cuba and China were tense during the Cold War, when the Caribbean island was strongly allied with the Soviet Union, but warmed after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Cuba lost its preferential trade and aid deals with the Soviet bloc.

China is now Cuba's third-largest trading partner, with a trade exchange of $985 million in 2005. China invests primarly in Cuba's nickel industry as well as tourism, transportation and telecommunications.

"Without a doubt these relations have developed in the framework of our shared political ideology," Cuba's Economics Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez told reporters at the Nonaligned summit this week.

But Communist Cuba has a unique relationship with China -- which so far seems unwilling to raise political quarrels with the United States over Latin America, said Javier Corrales, a Latin America expert at Ahmerst College in Massachussetts.

"At the moment," he said, "what China is doing is not costly in its relations with the U.S."

Nonaligned Movement summit (English version): http://www.cubanoal.cu/ingles/index.html

Castro photos raise expectations at summit

By Anita Snow, Associated Press Writer. September 14, 2006.

HAVANA - Cuban state television has shown photos of a pajama-clad Fidel Castro chatting animatedly with an Argentine congressman, raising expectations that the ailing Cuban president will use the Nonaligned Movement summit to make his first public appearance since undergoing surgery in July.

National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon said Wednesday that Castro "is doing well" and may participate in any activity at the Havana summit.

Castro, 80, has said he would have one-on-one meetings with foreign dignitaries. He was almost certain to meet with his close friend Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whom he has met three times since announcing on July 31 that he had undergone intestinal surgery and was temporarily ceding power to his 75-year-old brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro.

Also highly anticipated was the arrival of several prominent U.S. critics before a U.N. General Assembly session where Iran's nuclear ambitions and Venezuela's efforts to join the Security Council were to be key topics.

State television on Wednesday showed Castro chatting with Argentine Congressman Miguel Bonasso as they sat at a table. The news program "Mesa Redonda" said Bonasso, a frequent visitor to Cuba, had come as a personal representative of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner.

Former President Carlos Menem, a close U.S. ally, pulled Argentina out of the Nonaligned Movement in the early 1990s, saying his country was no longer a Third World nation. The country has since been humbled by a peso crash and subsequent economic crisis. Cuba said Argentina is welcome to rejoin the movement.

One country that won't take part in the summit is the United States, which declined an invitation to attend as an observer. A press officer at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana said there would be no comment on any matters discussed at the summit.

Still, the policies of President Bush came up repeatedly. Alarcon gave a lengthy speech Wednesday accusing the U.S. of breaking its own pledge to fight terrorism by harboring Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA operative and militant Castro foe wanted in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people.

On Monday, a federal magistrate in Texas said Posada Carriles should be released while he waits to be deported to any country but Cuba or Venezuela, where the U.S. fears he could be tortured.

"George W. Bush has said it, the White House said it: 'States that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists,'" Alarcon said. "Then I ask, 'Why does a federal judge decide that Posada Carriles can be set free?'"

Cuba, which takes over the group's three-year chairmanship from Malaysia on Friday, is trying to increase its prestige as a voice for the developing world.

Now including about two-thirds of the world's nations, the Nonaligned Movement developed during the Cold War as an alternative in a world split between the United States and Soviet Union. The movement grows to 118 members this week with the addition of the Caribbean states of Haiti and St. Kitts.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will attend as an observer, and was expected to meet with Fidel Castro. Many of the global leaders are to continue on to the U.N. session in New York, and some plan to meet Bush in Washington.

Among other well-known leaders attending are Presidents Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, as well as Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh of India and Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand.

Foreign Minister George Yeo visits Cuba

Channel News Asia via Yahoo! Asia News, September 14, 2006.

North Korea said it was sending its No. 2 leader, parliament head Kim Yong Nam.

HAVANA: Singapore's Foreign Affairs Minister George Yeo visited Cuba from the 10th to 12th of September.

While he was there, he called on Transport Minister Carlos Manuel Pazo, Economy Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez and Foreign Trade Minister Raul de la Nuez.

Mr Yeo also met the Vice Minister of Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation Ramon Ripoll, and met members of the Cuban business community.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry says Mr Yeo had a good exchange of views and experience on economic development during these meetings.

During his trip, Mr Yeo also met Cuban Minister of Public Health Jose Ramon Balaguer, and exchanged views on possible health-care cooperation.

They also discussed efforts by both Singapore and Cuba in the control of infectious diseases such as dengue.

Both agreed that officials from both sides should collaborate more closely to tap on each other's experience in the control of dengue.

Mr Yeo will stay on in Cuba to attend the Non-Aligned Movement Meetings from 13th to 15th September. - CNA /dt

Cuban dissident slams Non-Aligned over human rights

HAVANA, 13 sep (AFP) - A leading Cuban dissident slammed the Non-Aligned Movement, in the second day of a summit, for not making human rights a real priority, and failing to defend personal and political freedoms.

"It is regrettable that the human rights issue is not a real and genuine priority in the Non-Aligned Movement," Elizardo Sanchez, who leads the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said in a statement.

Cuba, which is hosting the NAM summit of more than 100 developing countries in Havana, is the only one-party communist ruled nation in the Americas.

The summit is officially led by an ailing Fidel Castro, 80, who was to meet with officials including UN chief Kofi Annan, Cuban officials say. But it was not known if Fidel, a NAM stalwart for decades, would take part in any public summit activity.

In a draft of the summit's final document, NAM members call for promoting "all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all."

Members do not, however, define their concept of human rights. Their political systems run the gamut from one party-communist rule as in Cuba, to royal rule, to theocracy, to western-style democracies.

The NAM draft document calls democracy a "universal value," but stresses that for NAM members "there is no single model of democracy, that it does not belong to any country or region" and demands respect for sovereignty and self-determination.

For Cuba's top diplomat Felipe Perez Roque, "the diversity that characterizes our movement, far from becoming an obstacle preventing us from reaching harmonization, must be the driving force for us to act united in light of the principles and purposes that we have jointly defined."

But Sanchez regretted that "most of the member governments of the NAM and especially its most active and 'historic' leaders persist in juxtaposing rights of the human person, and try to justify for example grave violations of civil and political rights with the supposed or real 'achievements' in the area of social rights."

"It is worth mentioning the cases ... of Cuba and North Korea, where there are schools for all children, and no one is excluded from basic health care, but any moderately informed person knows the governments violate all civil, political and economic rights of their citizens," he added, in a pointed critique following Fidel Castro's temporary handover of power to his brother Raul Castro that was announced July 31.

Sanchez said that his group had been denied legal recognition, and its "members had been exposed, like other members of independent Cuban associations, to every manner of persecution, jailings, and many forms of harassment and police monitoring." Cuba has more than 300 political prisoners, according to his group.

Another Cuban dissident group, Arco Progresista, on Monday issued a statement urging Cuba's government to make progress on human rights and political pluralism, at a sensitive time for Cuba's communist leadership.

Though Fidel Castro this week was included on an agenda of public events released by summit organizers, Cuban authorities later clarified that it was not yet known if he might be able to take part in them. The lower-profile Raul Castro, 75, would make his international-stage debut if he presides over top-level public summit proceedings.

The summit got under way in Havana Monday with veiled attacks on the United States and Israel, and a defense of Iran's controversial nuclear program.

The six-day gathering brings together leaders from about 50 developing nations, and high-level representatives from dozens more, including some of the most outspoken foes of the United States, such as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Syria. Its President President Bashar al-Assad was expected in Havana late Tuesday.

Among other leaders expected at the summit is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has defied UN demands that he halt uranium enrichment, the process used to make nuclear reactor fuel but also atomic bomb material.

Cuban Exiles Want Microloan Program

By Laura Wides-Munoz, AP Hispanic Affairs Writer. September 11, 2006.

Cuban Exile Group Wants to Start Microloan Program for Those on Island

MIAMI (AP) -- Several Cuban-American business leaders are seeking to boost the Cuban entrepreneurial spirit with small business startup loans that they believe could help stimulate the island's economy, but the plan first has to overcome restrictions enforced by the U.S. and Cuban governments.

The idea is to give microloans to people who want to start businesses such as selling food in the street. But the plan is a long shot, said Carlos Saladrigas, co-chairman of The Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan Washington-based organization that has pledged $10 million in seed money and plans to announce the program Tuesday.

The Cuban government prohibits most private enterprise, while U.S. law sets strict limits on sending money to the communist nation. Officials with the U.S. State and Treasury Departments had no immediate comment on the proposal.

And despite Cuban President Fidel Castro's recent hand-off of power to his brother Raul, there is little sign of any major changes in Cuba's economic policies.

"But we believe we have to take risks and seize opportunities, and we believe change is under way in Cuba," Saladrigas said. "Raul Castro is not a spring chicken, and collective leadership always harbors the seeds of reform."

Similar microloan programs have become popular throughout Latin America, in parts of Asia and even in some areas of the U.S. The loans would also be accompanied by training of Cuban entrepreneurs.

The Mexican bank Compartamos, which has offered microloans of less than $1,000 for more than 15 years, has agreed to work with the group if it gets permission.

"We realized it had a lot of sense, because in Cuba there are a lot of people with a lot of knowledge and education who don't have access to economic development," said Javier Fernandez Cueto, Compartamos' strategic planning director.

Saladrigas said his group did not want to see Cuba repeat the mistakes made in Latin America and violence-torn Iraq, where the focus was on large-scale reforms and too little emphasis was placed on economic development at the grass-roots level.

"Democracies are not phoenix birds, they don't just rise out of the ashes of collapsing societies," he said. "This is a way to begin at the bottom of society and empower the individual and help them become a stockholder in the new society."

Cubans Make It To US Border, Seek Asylum

KGTV TheSanDiegoChannel.com via Yahoo! News, September 13, 2006.

Nine Cubans who escaped from a Tijuana detention facility over the weekend and fled to the San Ysidro border crossing have requested political asylum in the United States, it was reported Wednesday.

Ten Cuban men and a man from Guyana, all of whom were facing possible deportation, broke through a fence at a detention center sometime after 10 p.m. Saturday, Mexican officials told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Nine of the Cubans made it to San Ysidro and requested asylum, officials told the newspaper. It's unclear what happened to the other Cuban.

U.S. officials confirmed that the Cubans are in local custody but declined comment on their asylum request, the newspaper reported.

The man from Guyana was caught in Tijuana by immigration authorities who once again are working to have him deported, San Diego-based Mexican Consul General Diego Luis Cabrera Cuaron told the Union-Tribune.

The Cubans, who were smuggled into Mexico, had been in Mexican custody while officials there decided whether to deport them to Cuba, Cabrera told the newspaper.

The facility from which they escaped is not a jail but a place where people stay while their immigration status is decided, the newspaper reported.

U.S. law treats Cubans differently from people from the rest of the world. Cubans fleeing the Castro regime who arrive on U.S. soil can apply for permanent residency.

Cabrera told the Union-Tribune that although the Cubans had been in Mexico, officials there aren't asking for their return.

Chavez-Castro friendship tricky for U.S.

By Ian James, Associated Press Writer. September 13, 2006.

CARACAS, Venezuela - One is a Cold War icon who has defied the United States for nearly a half-century. The other is a charismatic ex-military man who could be Washington's biggest Latin American nemesis for years to come.

Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez have put their close relationship on display with frequent visits by the Venezuelan president as the 80-year-old Cuban leader recovers from recent intestinal surgery. The two are expected to take the spotlight again this week as Havana hosts dozens of leaders at a summit of the Nonaligned Movement.

Chavez and his mentor Castro have markedly different styles, but their friendship ensures Cuba critical economic support with a bonanza of Venezuelan oil and credit.

Some who know the 52-year-old Venezuelan predict he will continue to promote Castro's beliefs, challenging U.S. hopes that the Cuban leader's illness will spur democratic change in the communist country.

Chavez "would be willing to provide all the economic support that's necessary to avoid an opening in Cuba, to avoid the U.S. having an influence in Cuba," said Cristina Marcano, co-author of a critical biography of the Venezuelan.

Castro and Chavez are united by what they call a crusade against U.S. dominance of Latin America and unbridled capitalism that is driving the world to ruin. A personal connection feeds their ideological closeness.

At Castro's bedside in Cuba recently, Chavez lovingly grasped the hand of the man he says he sees as a father.

"He's like the father of all the revolutionaries of our America. He's the lighthouse that lights the paths," Chavez said in one of his marathon speeches that, like Castro's, often run for hours.

Castro has designated his younger brother Raul as his eventual successor, but in many ways Chavez has already assumed Castro's role as Latin America's biggest challenge to the U.S. government.

On the economic front, Cuba's trade with Venezuela is booming. Venezuela has helped Cuba defy a U.S. trade embargo, partly supplanting Soviet subsidies that dried up in the early 1990s.

Venezuela predicts trade with Cuba will reach $1.8 billion this year, including shipments of some 98,000 barrels of oil a day sold under preferential terms including deferred payment. Meanwhile, thousands of Cuban doctors are treating poor Venezuelans for free.

"Chavez is a major factor in what's going to happen in Cuba from now on," said Larry Birns, of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs. "He essentially has rendered Castro and Castroism immune to any kind of U.S. action unless the U.S. is prepared to threaten its oil supply and begin a diplomatic conflagration in the Caribbean."

Chavez says Venezuelan troops would help defend Cuba against any U.S. invasion.

He has followed Castro's health closely since Cuba announced July 31 that Fidel was temporarily ceding power to his brother after the surgery.

And Chavez increasingly adopts ideas and phrases coined by Castro, including his common exclamation "Fatherland or death!" However, Chavez, unlike the more agnostic Castro, often expounds on links between Jesus Christ and socialism.

Other differences are more obvious.

Venezuela's brand of socialism, which Chavez calls the Bolivarian Revolution, remains a far cry from the communism Castro installed after the revolution toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

While Cuba maintains its single-party political system, Chavez - first elected in 1998 - is running for re-election in a multiparty system.

And while Chavez opponents accuse him of being an autocrat, much of Venezuela's news media remain virulently anti-Chavez. Private businesses continue to drive the Venezuelan economy, despite an increasing state role.

Chavez says the "21st century socialism" he's building will not fit a Cuban blueprint.

He also has praised Cuba as a "revolutionary democracy" with direct citizen participation at the grass-roots level, and he says Castro assures him Cuba's socialist system will live on.

On a Sept. 1 visit to Cuba, Chavez invoked Castro's traditional call to arms as a TV camera rolled: "Hasta la victoria siempre! Venceremos!" - "Toward victory always! We will prevail!"

Castro, visibly moved, repeated the words with gusto.

With more than 375,000 served, Cuba expands free eye surgery to Asia, Africa

HAVANA, 12 sep (AP) - Cuba will bring its free eye surgery program to Africa and Asia in the coming months, expanding a campaign that has restored eyesight to hundreds of thousands of poor people in 28 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Most of the surgeries are done at the Cuban Ophthamology Institute in western Havana, a complex of buildings with 34 operating rooms where 62 doctors and dozens of residents can perform simultaneous operations, the directors said.

But "Operation Miracle" has also expanded to clinics in Venezuela and Bolivia and Cuban teams will soon expand to Ecuador and Mexico as well.

Various countries in both Africa and Asia have asked for Cuba's help, so in December, the first eye clinic using technology provided by the Cuban government will open in a yet-to-be-named country in Africa or Asia, with more to follow, director Marcelino Rios Torres said in Havana at the Non-aligned Movement's summit.

The Cuban government usually pays for air fare and other costs, as well as the surgeries. Since the program began in July 2004 with a group of poor Venezuelan patients, Cuban doctors have performed eye surgery, mostly for cataracts, on 375,619 patients, Rios Torres said.

As the program has grown, Cuba has acquired cutting-edge technology, mostly from the European Union and Asia because of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. In return, Cuba offers specialists whose dedication to serve the poor reflects the zeal of the Cuban revolution, the directors said.

"The mission is only directed at those patients who can't pay for private health care and don't have insurance," said Reinaldo Rios Caso, the institute's vice-director.

The patients, he said, are "poor people who have been blind for years because they're poor and would continue to be blind if not for this kind of help."

In a waiting room decorated with flags from the participating countries, Maria Guadalupe Ortiz Calderon, 73, waited for cataract surgery Tuesday. She's from Arteaga, a village in the western Mexican state Michoacan where she said the people often go without food. For at least two years, cataracts left her practically blind and she had no money to pay for the operation.

When people in her village heard about the Cuban government program, her husband urged her to try it - requiring her first trip outside Mexico. State officials helped by preparing the necessary documents and sending them to Havana.

It's not only other countries that benefit - before the 1959 revolution, only 117 eye doctors served Cuba, of which only 37 remained after President Fidel Castro took power, they said. Now, there are more than 800, a number soon to grow to more than 1,000, and 79,828 Cubans were among the patients.

"It's true this is 'Made in Cuba': doctors who operate until three or four in the morning, doctors who work with a tremendous commitment. This isn't 'Made in Japan' or 'Made in the U.S.A.'," Rios Caso said.

"It's a genuine product of the Cuban revolution."

When Ortiz arrived the previous week, Cuban nurses gave her eye drops to prepare for the surgery.

"And with those eyedrops, thanks to God, I can already see a little bit," she said, unable to hide her excitement.

"God will pardon them for everything and he will be very grateful to them," Ortiz said when asked what image of Cuba she'll take back to her village.

But when asked, she said she didn't know why anyone would have to pardon Cuba.

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