Chávez is far from Castro's puppet
news.ft.com By Grant Nulle Published: February 18 2003 4:00 | Last Updated: February 18 2003 4:00
Sir, Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, ridiculed the Bush administration's sluggish response to recent explosive events in Venezuela ("Venezuela gets a nimble hand from Castro", January 21); but is it really alarming that Washington for once decided not to intervene unilaterally in a hemispheric nation?
Mr Naím's single-factor analysis of the Venezuelan crisis and Cuba's alleged pivotal role in it smacked of an obsolete cold war mentality. He did not introduce a single piece of serious and non-anecdotal evidence to support his charge.
Sadly, his thesis brought nothing to the debate that differs from the simple-minded, anti-Castro paranoia fostered by many fellow members of Venezuela's middle-class opposition, who see President Hugo Chávez as Havana's puppet.
This is not analysis so much as banality.
Doubtless, subsidised Venezuelan oil is helping the Cuban economy; but both Venezuela and Mexico have done this episodically for years, supplying discounted petroleum to other Caribbean basin countries.
Fidel Castro, Cuban president, would only lose financially and geopolitically by encouraging Mr Chávez to quicken the pace of his "Bolivarian revolution". Nor does a shred of evidence exist indicating that Mr Castro has directed Mr Chávez to radicalise his relations with the US through his intransigence, which unfortunately appears to be an intrinsic feature of the Venezuelan's prickly personality. In fact, the opposite is more likely, given the Cuban leader's counsel to President Salvador Allende to engage constructively the US during his 1971 visit to Chile, which he repeated to Grenada's Maurice Bishop in the early 1980s and Panama's Manuel Noriega in the late 1980s.
As for the influx of several thousand Cuban civil personnel into Venezuela, is Mr Naím telling us that only the US can have its Peace Corps? Exporting specialists to foreign states - doctors, teachers and sports coaches - irrespective of the host nation's political orientation has long been a mainstay of Cuban diplomacy, with few ascertainable intelligence pay-offs.
Instead of ominously pointing to Mr Castro's inroads in the Caribbean, the author should recall that relations between states are conducted for mutual benefit. If the English-speaking islands decide to enlarge the Caribbean Community to include Francophonic Haiti, why shouldn't it accord limited status to Havana, the Caribbean's largest island?
Mr Naím repeatedly employed a Castro allusion in a failed effort to clarify further the current Venezuelan tragedy. But in spite of his best efforts, neither Mr Chávez's intemperate personality nor Venezuela's disloyal and coup-prone opposition were authored by Havana.
Evoking a Cuban bogey and a sinister leftist spear-thrower in Mr Chávez is at the least simplistic, since Cuba's weakened economy stands to be one of the main losers if Mr Chávez's consensual survival is not achieved.
Grant M. Nulle, Research Associate, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington, DC 20036, US