Americas Features
Analysis: Chavez is Latin America's heir-apparent to aging Castro
By Veronica Sardon
Aug 7, 2006, 19:00 GMT

Buenos Aires - Fidel Castro turns 80 on Sunday. He has for decades been a natural leader in Latin America, with charisma that more than made up for Cuba's limited resources and gave the small country an oversize position in the continent's politics.

Today, as Castro grows inevitably older and the first clear signs appear of deterioration in his health, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is at his side, ready to take on the mantle as champion of Latin America's identity.

'I listen to you like to a pupil,' Fidel Castro told the Venezuelan president only last month, at a regional summit meeting in Argentina. The leaders were inseparable in Cordoba, one of the last public appearances of the Cuban president before handing power to his brother Raul on July 31 due to illness.

Chavez and Castro, wearing suits, spoke at the summit of the Mercosur trade alliance, which Venezuela recently joined. Then they shed their dress clothes for an alternative People's summit, giving their anti-imperialist rhetoric free rein in front of a cheering crowd of 50,000. Castro, who spoke three hours, wore his trademark military fatigues. Chavez donned a red scarf.

The next day, the ideological comrades visited Alta Gracia, paying tribute to Cuba's revolutionary hero Ernesto 'Che' Guevara who was born in Argentina, stopping at his childhood home and talking to some of his childhood friends.

At age 52, Chavez is keen to show that he has the nod from the continent's most significant living historical figure, a feather in the cap of a leader who already casts a large shadow through Venezuela's huge oil reserves.

After the Cuban revolution ended in 1959, and with Soviet backing, Castro transformed the small, poor Caribbean island into a communist country of crucial symbolic significance only 150 kilometres off shore of the world's largest declared foe of communism, the United States.

Castro's regime, for decades the symbolic Cold-War launching pad for hypothetical foreign attacks on the US, may now have been reduced to little more than a pebble in Washington's shoe since the end of the Cold War in 1990.

But Castro still commands high political clout in a Latin America whose economy suffered greatly in the 1990s under governments that enjoyed US approval. Castro is a presence at most important Latin American gatherings, and leaders like Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pay homage with visits to him.

Even Colombia's right-wing President Alvaro Uribe claims that Castro is the head-of-state he can reach fastest on the phone, and the Cuban leader has played an important part in peace negotiations with Colombia's left-wing guerrillas.

Relations between Cuba and its traditional ally Mexico - the country where an exiled Castro prepared his definitive 1956 assault - have deteriorated in recent years. But Cuba remains a 'must' destination for Mexico's left-wing politicians.

Thus it is hardly surprising that Chavez likes to be seen with Castro. He has a similarly fiery anti-US rhetoric and his left-wing, authoritarian ways are criticised from Washington in much the same way that the Cuban regime is vilified.

Many analysts say Venezuela is stepping in to replace the lost Soviet backing. Castro's regime receives up to 90,000 barrels of crude oil daily from Caracas, and pays below-market prices in kind by sending its highly trained health, education and security professionals to Venezuela.

Venezuela, as the world's fifth largest crude oil exporter, certainly has the economic power to play this role. Unlike Cuba, which has been under US economic blockade for 44 years, Venezuela sent 50 per cent of its exports to the US in 2005, trading 44 billion dollars with the nation whose 'imperialist' practices Chavez so roundly criticizes.

In fact, Chavez is looking to surpass his master who, despite surviving hundreds of assassination plots, some of them publicly sponsored by the US, and ten presidents in the White House, never never managed to translate his undeniable relevance into power at the regional level.

In sheer numbers, Venezuela far outstrips the Caribbean island, with 25 million people and a gross domestic product (GDP) of 164.1 billion dollars. Cuba has only 11 million people and a 33.9 billion- dollar economy.

But beyond that, Chavez can use trade for leverage. Just last month, the state-owned oil company narrowed the flow of petroleum to the US, which gets 11 per cent of its supplies from Venezuela, shutting down distribution through its wholly owned Citgo stations. US President George W Bush responded with a call for more energy independence for the US.

Conversely, Chavez is trying to diversify trade, looking for partners beyond the region in Asia to reduce Venezuela's dependence on the US.

Following Castro's rhetorical example, Chavez has called Bush a 'drunkard' and 'murderer,' flaunted visits to Iran, which has promised to fund Venezuela's nuclear development programme, and threatened to visit North Korea.

He also recently returned triumphant from a huge weapons shopping trip to Russia. Chavez can afford it. The country has huge foreign exchange reserves from soaring oil prices, and they give Chavez a shot at squaring Castro's circle - by leading a revival of fast- spreading regional leftist nationalism to erode Washington's traditional influence on Latin America.