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 Editorials | August 2005 
Latin American Leaders Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro Provoke Love and Hate in the Region
 Vanessa Arrington - CBC News
| | Cuban President Fidel Castro (R) and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez talk to media before Chavez's departure at Havana's Jose Marti airport last week. |
Havana - They've been called dictators and terrorists by the United States and blamed for brewing trouble throughout Latin America. But Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Cuban counterpart, Fidel Castro, insist they represent peace and progress and that Washington's wrath cannot halt their march to help the region's poor.
The Venezuelan and Cuban leaders barely acknowledged the latest criticism from their U.S. foes during a four-day visit by Chavez to Cuba, focusing instead on mutual plans they called noble and humane.
"What others think doesn't affect me a bit," Chavez said, the 79-year-old Castro at his side.
Only days earlier, American religious broadcaster Pat Robertson suggested Chavez should be assassinated, even as U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reiterated the Bush administration claim that Venezuela and Cuba foment regional instability.
Meanwhile, Castro and Chavez were announcing plans to educate more doctors to serve impoverished communities, increase the number of free eye operations for millions of Latin Americans and bring down oil prices for neighbouring countries.
The first doctors graduating last weekend expressed gratitude in interviews on Cuban state television. Hundreds of residents lined streets in a western Cuban town to shout support as a military jeep carrying the presidents raced by.
To their most ardent supporters, Castro and Chavez are practically demigods - heroic idealists striving for a world of equality and justice while fighting U.S. "imperialism."
To their foes in the United States, they are dangerous demagogues who use oil and medicine to manipulate poor people and aim to topple Latin American democracies, even though Venezuela is itself a democracy.
The emotion inspired by the two men stems from their rejection of gradual change to transform their societies, said Jennifer McCoy, a Latin America expert at Georgia State University and The Carter Center.
"Usually when there's radical change, people see it as a zero-sum game - you're either a winner or a loser," McCoy said. "They are polarizing figures."
Castro and Chavez have united in an initiative to export doctors to needy countries, something Cuba has done alone for decades, starting in Africa, then spreading across the Americas. Cuba in 1998 opened a medical school in Havana to provide free education to low-income students from across the region who promised to return home to serve their communities.
At the school's first graduation last weekend, Chavez announced he would build a similar facility in Venezuela, and that together the two countries would graduate 200,000 doctors over a decade.
Chavez and Castro supporters praise the initiative as altruism, but their critics call it "doctor diplomacy" meant to garner international support.
Chavez also wants to supply Venezuelan oil at below-market prices to Latin American countries under new initiatives backed by Castro - whose communist country already receives oil on preferential terms. Last weekend the Venezuelan leader announced a zero-interest oil loan to help Ecuador recover from violent protests that halted its own production.
Before leaving Cuba, Chavez said he could even export oil directly to poor U.S. communities, bypassing middlemen to reduce prices. And he called Castro "a mathematical genius" who "has a plan to bring down energy costs - the Fidel formula."
The charismatic presidents speak of a regional revolution in which Latin America stand united against U.S. hegemony - an attractive vision for regional groups who complain of U.S. meddling.
Comments by officials such as Rumsfeld - who last week chastised Venezuela and Cuba for "unhelpful" behaviour during unrest in Bolivia - are interpreted by some as attempts to tell Latin America how to run itself.
Other leftist leaders have welcomed calls for greater independence from Washington.
Evo Morales, who leads Bolivia's coca growers and is a candidate for president, calls himself a follower of Chavez. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been a leader in regional integration efforts.
But Silva has sidestepped the anti-American rhetoric of Chavez and Castro, who Jaime Suchlicki, a Cuba expert at the University of Miami, says are "trying to export the revolution in opposition to the United States."
For Suchlicki, U.S. fears of such a movement are well-founded.
"A lot of the natural resources that we use come from Latin America," he said. "Add in U.S. investment in Latin America, plus trade, and you can see a lot of economical concern and hardship." |
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