http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ben_whitford/2007/03/chvez_is_no_castro.html
Chávez is no Castro Neither the excesses nor the achievements of the Venezuelan leader are in the same béisbol-park as his cigar-puffing neighbour. Ben Whitford March 1, 2007 9:30 PM Hugo Chávez likes to style himself as a revolutionary. When he won reelection last year, having finally broken the back of the domestic opposition, he dedicated the victory to "the Bearded One": his friend and mentor, Fidel Castro. Since then he's painted himself as the aging Cuban's heir apparent, nationalizing Venezuela's largest telecommunications and electricity companies and moving to take a majority share in foreign-owned oil-drilling operations along the Orinoco belt.
From his bombastic policies to his trademark red beret, everything
about the Venezuelan leader's revolutionary streak is carefully calibrated to stir up strong feelings in supporters and critics alike. The American right's demonization of Chávez is in large part a knee-jerk reaction to his outspoken praise for Castro and mimicry of the Cuban's brand of revolutionary socialism. For much the same reasons, as George Galloway showed yesterday, Chávez inspires something close to infatuation among certain sections of the British left. In Chávez's Bolivarian revolution, both sides hear echoes of Havana, 1959, and are respectively appalled or enthralled. The truth of the matter, however, is somewhat more complicated. Chávez is no Castro: neither his excesses nor his achievements are in the same béisbol-park as those of his cigar-puffing neighbor. The former paratrooper is a more moderate breed of caudillo, using the rhetoric of revolution to manipulate both his enemies and his allies, at home and abroad. Chávez has little time for the checks and balances of liberal democracy. Both the Supreme Court and the National Assembly are stuffed with his cronies; his knack for gaming the country's electoral system makes Karl Rove look like Jefferson Smith; and he recently gave himself the right to govern by decree well into 2008. But if Chávez loads the decks, he is at least still playing the game. He welcomes the legitimacy of being the more-or-less democratically-elected leader of a more-or-less democratic country. He may occasionally close down a TV station he dislikes, but he also tolerates a robust and highly critical news media and allows Venezuelans to gather in their thousands to demonstrate against him. And while there are unsettling rumors of political detentions, Venezuela has nothing to rival Cuba's systematic suppression of dissent. Venezuela is a troubled nation [aren't they all? -- JD], then, but hardly a totalitarian one. Neither, however, is it in the throes of Cuban-style social revolution. Say what you like about Castro: in the face of overwhelming odds, he gave Cuba a world-class health service, a thriving biotech industry, and a free and flourishing education system. Under his rule, despite America's misguided economic blockade and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Cuba's infant mortality rates fell below those of America; literacy soared. These achievements don't begin to justify Castro's awful human rights record, but they are astonishing feats of social engineering. Chávez, with far greater resources and in the face of far fewer obstacles, has accomplished far less. He has presided over a period of enormous wealth - oil was $12 a barrel when he took office, and stands at over $60 a barrel today - but has little to show for it besides a hundred thousand AK47s and a hefty stack of frequent flyer miles [from Chávez's globe-trotting diplomacy]. By some measures social spending has actually decreased under Chávez; poverty is still rampant; inflation remains high; more than a million Venezuelans remain illiterate; corruption is rife; crime rates are rocketing. Worse, many of Chávez's "revolutionary" programs fail to make lasting improvements to Venezuelan society. Take Chávez's most-widely trumpeted social program, the importation of some 20,000 Cuban doctors to establish free local clinics for the poor. While the program has done some good in the poorest barrios, it does little to fix Venezuela's creaking healthcare system in the long term. When the oil boom ends and the Cubans go home (or defect), Venezuela's poor will be left back where they started: with a barely-functioning two-tier health service. The truth is that while Chávez's sympathy for the poor is probably genuine, his "Bolivarian revolution" has sought not to impose seismic structural changes on Venezuelan society, but rather to leverage the country's oil wealth to temporarily paper over the cracks. Revolution, for Chávez, was less an ideology than a gambit; in speaking so long and so loudly of revolution, he hoped to polarize his own people and international opinion, and thereby cement his own grasp on power. Chavez is both a democrat and an authoritarian: opposition is too widespread to be safely repressed, so he seeks instead to remain broadly within the democratic mainstream, splitting and antagonizing his critics, pushing them further to the right and then using their very virulence to justify the concentration of power in his own hands. In that light, preaching revolution has served Chávez well. The ragbag of right-wingers and out-of-work oligarchs who make up the Venezuelan opposition's leadership were sent into a predictable frothy-mouthed frenzy by his talk of communist revolution; they now spend the bulk of their time spluttering in reactionary outrage, attacking the model he claims to represent rather than putting forward their own solutions to the country's problems. His supporters, meanwhile, are too caught up in the fervor of revolution to quibble over the erosion of their civil liberties. Hugo Chávez's opponents like to portray him as a clown; in fact, he's proven remarkably shrewd. He is neither a socialist saviour nor a red menace; rather, he is a calculating and pragmatic leader who donned the mantle of Castro-style revolutionary socialism to wrong-foot his opponents. In attacking America and cosying up to Cuba, Chávez has now won the support of a broad swathe of the international left, and the opprobrium of a still-wider tract of the American right. Both sides are ultimately playing into his hands, validating his revolutionary sleight-of-hand and overlooking the essential realpolitik that lies, for good or for bad, at the heart of chavismo. -- Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
