The Foreign Service Journal, May 2005

64 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 5 obody paid much attention when Hugo Chavez bounded off a plane in Cuba in December 1994 and received a hearty welcome from President Fidel Castro. Chavez had just been released from a Venezue- lan prison where he spent more than two years for leading a bloody but unsuccessful military revolt in February 1992 against the elected pro-U.S. gov- ernment. The cordial reception for Chavez in Havana sug- gested that Castro saw the Venezuelan army veteran, 28 years his junior, as a man of conviction and daring, the same qualities that had catapulted Castro to power in 1959. Late 1994 was a grim period for Cuba. The country had been experiencing a catastrophic economic decline follow- ing the collapse of its main benefactor, the Soviet Union, three years earlier. At age 35, Cuba’s revolution looked spent. But Chavez was still a believer, calling the country “a bastion of dignity in Latin America.” He later said, “It’s the first time we have come to Cuba physically, but in our dreams we have come an infinity of times.” Castro and Chavez seemed to see the world through the same anti- American lens. Castro has always been an extremely acute political analyst. He predicted the demise of Soviet com- munism well before it happened. In 1994, he perceptively hailed Chavez as a comer. Fast-forward a decade to Jan. 31, 2005. Chavez, com- pleting six years as Venezuela’s elected president, is stand- ing at a podium in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where tens of thousands of leftists are gathered for a conference. “The imperialist forces are starting to strike against the people of Latin America and the world,” Chavez declares. Opposition to America and support for Cuba are staples of Chavez’s presidency. Awash in ambition and petrodollars, he has become America’s biggest headache in the hemi- sphere. Not long ago, a sharp shift to the left in Venezuela would have been unimaginable. The country seemed immune to the kind of political upheavals so common elsewhere in the region. Besides Cuba, there were leftist triumphs in Nicara- gua and Chile. At the same time, military rule in the area was common well into the 1980s. Venezuela was one of the few models of democratic stability. It was seen as a privi- leged Third World country, blessed with abundant oil reserves, greater social mobility than its neighbors and a centrist political tradition that resisted extremism. As Venezuelan experts Miguel Tinker-Salas and Steve Ellner point out in an essay, Venezuela long seemed an exception- alist country to many observers, not “a likely candidate in Latin America for a sharp shift to the left.” That assessment turned out to be wrong. It soon became clear that Venezuela’s pre-Chavez experience mirrored that of a number of other Latin American countries during that period: The democratic form was there, but not the sub- stance. As Tinker-Salas notes in a separate essay, Venezuela may have been rich in oil but was still a poor country two decades ago. “During the 1980s, the suggestion that the oil econo- my could uplift broad sectors of the population, or provide an entryway into the middle class, ceased to hold sway among the disenfranchised sectors of society,” he writes. H UGO C HAVEZ : A N EW C ASTRO ? T HE V ENEZUELAN PRESIDENT ’ S AUTHORITARIAN TENDENCIES REPRESENT A GROWING CONCERN TO THE B USH ADMINISTRATION , WHICH IS SPEAKING OUT MORE ABOUT THE THREAT HE POSES TO THE HEMISPHERE . B Y G EORGE G EDDA George Gedda, a frequent contributor to the Journal , covers the State Department for The Associated Press. N