Chavez Propping up Cuba

Back from Chicago

We spent this Thanksgiving in Chicago visiting with my wife's parents and some of her other relatives. This year's visit was more of a typical Thanksgiving than last year's jam-packed tourist package, and included some heavy lifting on my part since the in-laws had just barely moved into a new, larger condominium after their first year there. We did take time to see the excellent exhibit "Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption" at the Field Museum, and saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Considering that the latter was a condensation of a very long book into a single movie, I thought it quite good.

Hugo Chavez: Fidel Castro's New Sugar Daddy

For the flight back, I picked up a copy of the Chicago Tribune for the oddball masthead price of $1.79 and found this very interesting article on how Venezuela has replaced the old Soviet Union as Cuba's main financial crutch. The focus of the article is on "Miracle Mission" (or Mision Milagro), whereby expensive eye surgeries are given to people from all over Latin America and the Caribbean for "free" (read: bankrolled with looted oil profits and slave labor).

For the first time in nearly a generation, Cuba's moribund economy is showing signs of life because of a new program financed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to provide residents across Latin America and the Caribbean free eye surgery.

Called Mision Milagro, or Miracle Mission, the campaign has provided more than 122,000 cataract and other eye operations this year to patients from Venezuela to Jamaica to Bolivia.

As will unfortunately become even more than obvious shortly, this is a cynical propaganda ploy on the part of Chavez, who hopes to achieve a Christ-like reputation throughout the region as some sort of miracle worker. Even the "financing" sounds like a goofy shell game of the type only a gullible American newspaper reporter would fail to regard with a jaundiced eye.

The revenue is used to cover the cost of receiving 98,000 barrels of discounted Venezuelan oil daily, essentially canceling what traditionally has been Cuba's largest import bill and its greatest drain on hard currency resources.

Does anyone else really believe there is actual trade -- of the civilized, capitalist variety -- going on here between Cuba and Venezuela? Oh, wait. Reporter Gary Marx did manage to scare up an equally gullible economist.

"This is an excellent business for Cuba," said Pedro Monreal, an economist at the University of Havana. "This is like striking gold."

I prefer my gold nuggets without strings attached, but.... If you're a slave striking the gold, you may indeed enjoy some incidental benefit from such a find, but you will have no control over your life and therefore none over the expenditure of the profits. Translation: To the extent Castro relies upon this kind of help, he is beholden to Chavez. And, by the way, this predictably and unsurprisingly yields no real benefit to the Cuban people -- on top of helping keep Castro in power.

Even with the Venezuelan assistance and an economy that Cuban authorities say is growing 9 percent this year, few Cubans say their lives have improved. Blackouts, shortages of consumer goods and other problems persist.

Some Cubans express resentment at the resources being poured into Mision Milagro, complaining that foreigners get better medical treatment than they do. Other Cubans seethe as they watch foreign patients driven to and from hospitals in new Chinese luxury buses while they wait for hours for scarce public transportation.

"I was standing in the blazing sun, and three of these Chinese buses with patients passed with an ambulance behind it," said one Havana resident. "I thought these buses were for us."

Despite the complaints, Castro announced that Cuba is equipping and staffing hospitals throughout the island to sharply increase the number of eye operations.

Incidentally, this is not the first time I have heard of Cubans having to walk while foreigners got to ride buses. Not to condone Jim Crow laws in any way, but I would note, for the edification of leftist fans of Castro, that at least blacks in the Jim Crow South got to ride on the buses.

It is worth noting to whom the great benefits of socialism are being touted: Those naive souls imported into Cuba for the "free" operations. Anyone already under Castro's thumb is left to deal with shortages even though the Cuban economy is said to be improving at a 9% per annum clip. Ironically, Gary Marx mentions blackouts. In one sense, then, while the Cuban government is restoring site to foreigners, it is blinding its own citizens! Or perhaps if Marx were a better spinmeister reporter, he'd say something like, "the almost-daily restoration of sight to the customers of the state power company also fits neatly into Castro's agenda".

Or are these foreigners as lucky as they sound? There are, buried near the end of this gushing article, hints of trouble in the workers' paradise.

At least one nurse involved in the eye operations said Cuban physicians are sacrificing quality for quantity as they hurry to complete as many operations as possible.

The nurse said the number of eye operations at her hospital has soared from about 15 to more than 120 daily, and many patients fail to receive important preoperative tests, she said. The surgeries are performed round-the-clock.

"Nobody is in agreement with this, but they say that you have to do it without discussion," the nurse said. "The patients are being mistreated."

Sadly, until something is done about Chavez, he and Castro will probably collect brownie points even for these "efforts" when they fail.

Chavez Ally Loses Ground in Mexico

In related news, things now look less gloomy in the upcoming Mexican presidential elections than they did just a few months ago.

While the PAN and PRI primaries were developing, frontrunner [and Chavez ally] Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) decided to play safe and not involve himself in other parties’ activities. However his caution backfired, as [Felipe] Calderon [Hinojosa] not only outdistanced [Roberto] Madrazo but too managed to cut the margin of the populist ex-mayor of Mexico City from 19 percent to seven percent.

Interestingly, a recent diplomatic episode may have helped this in more ways than one.

Part and parcel too of Lopez Obrador’s dip in popularity was a verbal scuffle that sprang up between President Vicente Fox and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, following the Summit of the Americas in Argentina. As trade progress was obstructed by Chavez led Latin American socialists, Fox made indirect remarks criticizing Chavez who replied by insulting Fox, calling him a lapdog and the Americans. These events sparked a diplomatic crisis that led to the recalling of both countries’ ambassadors. It is speculated that Fox took advantage of the situation to rid Mexico of Venezuelan envoy Vladimir Villegas, who was allegedly coordinating a Venezuela-Cuba smear campaign against Fox while supporting Lopez Obrador’s candidacy [bold added].

Moral: It pays to stand up to the likes of Chavez.

An Interesting Line of Inquiry

This last is more along the lines of a note to myself....

A great benefit of subscribing to TIA Daily, aside from having a good digest of the most important news stories of the day with incisive commentary, is that one can occasionally learn how to read the news more critically for oneself. For example, while I noted in passing some time back:

... I am glad the House voted down immediate troop withdrawal. It will be interesting to see what becomes of the withdrawal plan handed to Rumsfeld recently and spun by the media.

Robert Tracinski said the following on November 23:

One of the more cynical interpretations of the recent hysteria over the Iraq War--and because it is a speculation on the motives of the left, the cynicism may well be justifiable--is that Democrats in Congress know that the war against the Sunni insurgency has been largely successful and that the US may be able to safely reduce the number of troops in Iraq next year (and that we will definitely remove troops added to protect Iraq's October and December elections).

Since that could be seen as a victory for the Bush administration, the Democrats are therefore stepping up their demands to withdraw troops, so that when President Bush does so, it will look like he is caving in to political pressure. The deep irresponsibility of this strategy, however, is that in trying to deny a victory to President Bush, the Democrats will also deny a victory to America, making it look as if the United States has withdrawn in failure.

I'll admit up front that I was nowhere close to making this integration. While the CNN story (second link in my self-quote above) about the proposed reductions in US military presence in Iraq does mention that these are contingent on "milestones" having been reached, I'd already forgotten that we'd stepped up our presence for the elections and I simply hadn't made the connection that our success against the "insurgency" in much of Iraq might allow us to draw down a bit in the near future.

These are crucial points, but those don't impress me as much as the conclusion Tracinski was able to draw concerning the general leftist hype of recent weeks concerning Iraq and troop withdrawals. Now, I'm also not about to pretend to be able to read Tracinski's mind here -- he may have reached his conclusion that the left found a clever way to deny Bush a victory from an entirely different premise than this -- but the second paragraph of the above suggests to me a line of inquiry to keep in mind when reading the news, especially from particularly liberal outlets. Namely: What might a leftist hope to achieve by reporting the news in a certain way? (Specifically here: How can it hurt Bush?)

I often ask this question anyway, but here, Tracinski did it at a time when I was halfway falling for the slant and fearing that Bush might indeed be about to pull out before appropriate. Granted, Bush, by not always effectively communicating his intentions, does not make it especially easy not to fall for such an interpretation of the Rumsfeld/withdrawal story. But asking the above question in this context anyway makes one able to consider other hypotheses about the story.

Only time will tell what is really going on here, but it apparently can pay to be extremely cynical of media coverage.

-- CAV