'CHAVISTA' UTOPIA
The ghost of 'Venecuba' returns
BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
www.Firmaspress.com
The danger is real. The Venezuelan democrats fear that, in view of Hugo
Chávez's cancer coinciding with the inevitable disappearance of a Fidel
Castro much battered by illness and the years, Havana and Caracas might
hurriedly dust off the plans of federation that they announced in late
2005 and later shelved.
How did the idea of uniting the two countries come about? It was a
somnambulant aftermath of the Cold War, conceived by Fidel Castro at the
start of the new millennium, when he convinced his rapt Venezuelan
disciple that it was up to Havana and Caracas — to Fidel and Hugo,
really — to continue with the anti-imperialist struggle that had been
abandoned by the Russian traitors from the moment that Gorbachev,
manipulated by the CIA, sold himself to capital, dissolved the Soviet
Union and ended the model of Marxist-Leninist government that, since
1917, militated in favor of the workers of the world.
A call was made back to the trenches, this time seeking new electoral
procedures. Once in government, the bourgeois republican structures in
the conquered territories had to be dismantled, gradually liquidating
the formal freedoms and division of powers that limit a strongman's
authority.
For this new historic stage, Chávez would put up the petrodollars, and
Fidel would contribute the strategic vision, the cadres and the
knowledge of the methods of revolutionary struggle learned during the
several decades that Castro worked as Moscow's shield bearer. But, to do
that, they had to forge a two-headed state that could act in coordination.
In reality, Fidel saw the skies open when Chávez appeared in his path.
El Comandante had found no one among his own people with the capacity
for confabulation and the missionary spirit that great political utopias
require.
Raúl Castro was certainly not a good replacement, because he lacked the
ability to dream while awake and, above all, the urgency to fight Yankee
imperialism until victory, always. He was a good administrator, loyal
and discreet, capable of maintaining rigid control over society and
government, but nothing else. Fidel's political heir, the man who
wouldn't let his historical feats die, was Chávez. The two hallucinated
on the same frequency, with similar intensity.
After the military coup of April 2002 that removed him from power and
reinstated him within 72 hours, Chávez came to a conclusion that
reinforced Fidel's approach: the Bolivarian and Cuban revolutions could
be saved and pushed forward only if the two men built an international
perimeter of protection around a Venezuelan-Cuban axis they would call
ALBA and endowed it with a muddled discourse called 21st-century socialism.
Within that logic of survival, in late 2005, then-Cuban foreign minister
Felipe Pérez Roque, former vice president of the Council of State Carlos
Lage, and Chávez himself ambiguously announced the fusion of both states
into a new entity and even appointed a commission of jurists that began
to study the coupling within a common legal and institutional framework.
However, a few months later, Fidel fell gravely ill, and his ailment
took him out of the battlefield.
After precipitously receiving the reins of government, Raúl sidelined
the project of a two-nation confederation (though he didn't discard it)
and devoted his time to consolidating his power and partially reforming
the catastrophic productive apparatus that had the Cuban people,
according to his diagnosis, "on the edge of the abyss."
However, he acknowledged de facto that Hugo Chávez, by his brother's
design and the Venezuelan's vocation, was first among equals and the
international leader of 21st-century socialism. To Raúl, Chávez meant
more than 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day and billions of dollars
in subsidies, so challenging his leadership made no sense.
Instead, Raúl had to maintain the alliance and continue to render
political and intelligence services to Chávez and his satellites
(Bolivia, for instance), his government's two specialties.
Now, ironically, it's Chávez's life that is in danger, along with
Fidel's. Perhaps 21st-century socialism will find itself without a
monarch and Cuba without a protector, which would mean absolute ruin for
Havana and the end of the Chavista utopia.
How to allay that danger? No doubt, as the Venezuelan democrats fear, by
quickly reprising the project of confederation between the two
countries, so "the Cubans" can hold power in a Hugo-less Venezuela,
governed in name only by a faithful ally of Havana (Adán Chávez, for
example), while Raúl, haunted by the feeling that the entire scaffolding
can topple in an instant, remains a parasite of Caracas, anxiously
hoping that his slow reforms will start to give fruit and that the
island someday may achieve self-sufficiency.
In other words, another utopia.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/12/2309937/the-ghost-of-venecuba-returns.html
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