Castros Comeback

Castro's Comeback

Fidel has more fans in the region than he's had in years. But is the
hype, like the resurgence of Latin America's left, more style than
substance?
By Joseph Contreras
Newsweek International

March 20, 2006 issue - Anyone who doubts that symbolism matters to the
Latin American left need only have looked last week to Venezuela, where
fire-breathing President Hugo Chavez forced several critical changes to
the country's flag through a pliant legislature. The new banner will
incorporate a machete, bow-and-arrow and tropical fruits and flowers, to
acknowledge the nation's peasantry. From it will shine eight stars
instead of seven—the last added as a homage to Venezuela's 19th-century
independence hero Simon Bolivar. And most important, a galloping white
horse that once faced right—"into the past," according to Chavez—will
now look, naturally, to the left.

So, too, does much of the region today, from Brazil to Bolivia. And the
symbol that has benefited most from the new perspective is not a horse,
but the left's reigning lion in winter, Fidel Castro. Not so long ago
the Cuban leader, who will turn 80 this summer, seemed a shrinking
figure on the Latin American stage. As recently as 2002 Chavez was his
only ally in the hemisphere; his neighbors widely regarded him as a
Stalinist dinosaur whose heyday had long since passed. But since then,
Castro has experienced a remarkable resurgence. Chavez and new Bolivian
President Evo Morales openly hail him in speeches; Havana was Morales's
first port of call in his post-election tour of foreign capitals this
winter. Even more mainstream leaders, including Argentina's Nestor
Kirchner and Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are no longer afraid to
grip-and-grin for the cameras with the Caribbean strongman. "The map is
changing," a pleased Castro exulted after Morales's December victory.

How it's changing is the question—and the answer says as much about the
supposed strength of Latin America's leftward tilt as it does about
Castro himself. Fidel's comeback began a year ago when the European
Union, at the urging of Spain's left-wing President José Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero, lifted diplomatic sanctions it had imposed on Cuba in the
spring of 2003 to protest a sweeping crackdown on internal dissidents.
Moderate governments in Uruguay and Panama restored full diplomatic
relations with Cuba later in 2005, and Castro scored a diplomatic coup
at a recent summit of the 15-nation Caribbean Community. Leaders there
issued a communiqué calling on the Bush administration to extradite a
jailed Cuban exile accused of masterminding the bombing of a Cubana
Airlines plane in 1976.

An unabashedly pro-Cuba documentary about the U.S. trade embargo
premiered in Buenos Aires in November with the backing of the Argentine
government's film institute. And these days even an openly right-wing,
Bush-friendly president like Colombia's Alvaro Uribe Velez can see the
benefits of having a working —relationship with Cuba. Late last year he
accepted Castro's offer to reopen peace talks in Havana with one of
Colombia's leading Marxist guerrilla factions.

The Cuban leader can thank his traditional betê noire, Washington, for
much of his bolstered reputation. "In the last decade we've paid less
attention to Latin America than we should have," says Jaime Suchlicki,
director of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and
Cuban-American Studies. "Castro is a big beneficiary." The Bush
administration's bring- 'em-on approach to foreign affairs has inspired
visceral scorn across the region—and a grudging respect for the one
leader who consistently rails against America.

If the sorry state of the Cuban economy remains a black mark against
Castro, he can always blame it on the longstanding U.S. commercial
boycott of the island. Elsewhere, many in the region believe they are
seeing no greater benefit from the market-oriented policies aggressively
promoted by Washington and have been throwing out pro-U.S. politicians
in election after election. The Bush administration's clear distaste for
Morales—expressed openly during his failed bid for the Bolivian
presidency in 2002—certainly boosted his campaign this time around. "To
a certain degree the Americans have abetted the political career of
Evo," says Bolivian political analyst Carlos Toranzo. "They seem
incapable of understanding the changes that are happening in Latin America."

Still, castro's return to respectability contains a hefty dose of irony.
In the 1960s Havana funneled arms and equipment to communist guerrilla
movements in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries in a
fruitless bid to spawn like-minded regimes across Latin America. In the
1970s Castro supported the Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua, and in 1980
he helped broker the union of El Salvador's five guerrilla armies, who
were fighting to overthrow a U.S.-backed military-civilian junta. By
contrast, all of Latin America's left-of-center leaders today, apart
from Castro himself, have gained power through the ballot box instead of
the barrel of a gun. "Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and
Uruguay's Tabaré Vázquez are democrats," notes Harvard government
professor Jorge Dominguez. "It is very important not to confuse them
with Castro because they really do believe in competitive elections and
the free exercise of public liberties."

Many of those leaders now clearly praise Castro for their own purposes.
In the current political climate, a photo op with the graying patriarch
of the Latin American left can go a long way toward establishing a
president's credibility with his more militant followers. Brazil's Lula,
for instance, took a giant step toward ending Cuba's diplomatic
isolation in 2003, when he visited Havana during his first year in
office. That trip took place at a time when the Brazilian leader faced
mounting criticism at home that he was reneging on campaign pledges to
boost economic growth and aid the country's poor.

Such gestures are made easier by Castro's weakness, not his strength.
"Many of these newly elected governments don't see Cuba as an
adversary," says William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert who heads the School
of Public Affairs at American University in Washington. Cuba no longer
has the funds or the energy to foment revolution; now it exports doctors
and nurses to its neighbors.

Because Cuba has defied consistent efforts by the United States to
isolate it, the country does retain an aura of independence that many
Latin American nations, buffeted by waves of globalization, believe
they've lost. But none feels any great need or pressure to emulate the
Cuban example economically. Mexico, which once cultivated close ties to
Cuba and is host to the region's second biggest economy, is in fact one
of the few major countries that has not warmed to Fidel; ties have
remained frosty ever since Mexican President Vicente Fox condemned
Cuba's human-rights record and asked Castro to leave a U.N.-sponsored
summit in the city of Monterrey one day before the arrival of George W.
Bush.

Indeed, the enduring Castro mystique in some Latin American circles has
always been rooted more in attitude than ideology. In the 47 years since
he overthrew a pro-U.S. dictator, only Nicaragua's Sandinistas tried to
copy elements of Castro's socialist model—and that effort was a half
measure at best. Chavez to date has shown no appetite for expropriating
the assets of foreign energy companies operating in Venezuela, and in
the run-up to his Inaugu—ration, Morales backed off from earlier talk of
nationalizing Bolivia's natural-gas and oil industries. "These new
presidents who like to pay their respects to Fidel are not products of
him," says Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born director of Florida
International University's Latin America and Caribbean Center. "Their
rise is largely rooted in domestic factors, and Fidel is less of a main
driving force."

The current crop of Latin America's left-wing leaders is distinguished
more by a rhetorical concern for economic inequality than for
drastically different economic policies. Michelle Bachelet may be a
card-carrying member of Chile's Socialist Party, but following her
Inauguration last week as her country's first female president she
promised to maintain the same free-market economic policies that have
made Chile the darling of foreign investors in the region. Lula has
adopted prudent economic policies since he took office three years ago,
and his government recently paid off the country's outstanding debt to
the International Monetary Fund. So too did Argentina's Kirchner, a
radical Peronist militant in his youth who has presided over three
consecutive years of impressive growth since taking office. "There is no
real risk of another Cuba," argues Lula's predecessor Fernando Henrique
Cardoso in his newly published memoir, "The Accidental President of
Brazil." "No country in Latin America wants to follow Cuba's path anymore."

Small wonder. Cuba today is a shabby showcase for socialism. Two major
hurricanes in 2005 exacerbated the island's housing shortage of 500,000
units, and many Cubans publicly grumbled last summer over the worst
spate of electrical blackouts in recent memory. Warning his listeners
that "this country can self-destruct," a worried Castro announced in
November yet another crackdown on rampant corruption and a thriving
black market fueled by chronic scarcities of consumer goods. And as if
he didn't have enough on his septuagenarian mind, the Cuban leader is
constantly having to deny persistent rumors about his health, fanned by
a recent CIA report suggesting that he is suffering from Parkinson's
disease. As an icon for the left, Fidel Castro is enjoying a rare moment
in the sun. The same can hardly be said about the society he created, or
the appeal it retains beyond the shores of his native land.

2006 Newsweek, Inc.
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