AS FIDEL APPROACHES HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY, there has been continuous speculation about his health. In recent years, numerous visitors to Havana have described Fidel’s apparent mental lapses and his more frequent verbal meanderings noticed during meetings. Ultimately, a staggering fall from a low platform in October 2004 confirmed a decline in the leader’s condition. And with Fidel’s aging comes the issue of his succession. Who will remain at the helm of the Cuban revolution? And as importantly, will there still be a beacon of anti-Washington sentiment after Castro leaves the Latin American scene? As analysts monitor developments in Havana to decipher the unfolding succession, another transferal of power seems to be taking place simultaneously.

FOREIGN POLICY REORIENTATION
As a long-exhausted regime fades on the island, Venezuela positions itself to inherit Cuba’s revolutionary mantle. Ideologically, President Hugo Chávez is much less orthodox than his Cuban mentor and counterpart. From his abrupt appearance onto Venezuelan political life as a coup leader (1992), Chávez has arbitrarily blended a mix of populism, nationalism, militarism, socialism, and Latin America irredentism. However, his defining ideological tenet (and most persistent one) seems to be unmitigated anti-Americanism.

Under his watch, Venezuela has seen the democratic debate become distorted as the civil society witnessed a series of assaults on civic liberties, pluralism, and independent political activity. Alarmingly, Chávez has militarized the state to a point where Venezuelan editor Teodoro Petkoff has noted: “For all practical purposes, this is a government of the Armed forces”. This process also involves the dilution of key institutional governance principles, such as the limitation of power and checks and balances. To the changes implemented in the domestic front, Chávez added a drastic reorientation of the country’s foreign policy.

NEW INTERNATIONAL ROLE
According to analyst Michael Shifter, from the outset, Venezuela has been too small a stage for his unlimited ambition. Fueled by the unexpected oil bonanza (Chávez came to power at only $12 a barrel, and since then it has exceeded $60 a barrel), Caracas aggressively pursues an international role that taps into both regional and global connections.

In Latin America, Chávez’s behavior has been disconcertingly erratic. To an unrelenting tribute to the Cuban regime, he has flirted dangerously with the Colombia-armed conflict. Furthermore, Chávez has inflamed intra-nation tensions, border disputes (such as the one involving Bolivia and Chile), and heightened hemispheric differences vis-à-vis the United States.

Beyond the Americas, the Venezuelan President has staged, through the media, foreign incursions by reaching out to discredited and tyrannical regimes. In 2004, Chávez received in Libya an improbable human rights award from none other leader than Muamar Gadafi himself. In addition, during an official visit to Iran, he commended the Iranian revolution (which was deemed sister to the “Bolivarian revolution”). While in Iran, Chávez also praised the highly-repressive mullah regime’s quest for nuclear capacity, an initiative that not only seriously threatens Israel but also risks the balance of power in the whole region. Consistently with these stances, Venezuela voted in favor of Iran (and against submitting its worrying nuclear development to the UN Security Council) at the International Atomic Energy Agency. In doing so, the country sided with the beleaguered Syrian regime and Castro’s Cuba, two pariah members of the international community.

HAVANA – CARACAS AXIS
In a recently-released book, Hugo Chávez Sin Uniforme (Hugo Chávez Without Uniform), Venezuelan journalists Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka carefully followed his journey and ascent to power until the consolidation of the allegedly Bolivar-inspired regime.

Marcano and Barrera Tyszka revealed the colorful coterie of undemocratic ideologues that, at different stages of Chávez’s political awakening, contributed to his becoming a political leader. Through their book, emerges the fascination he developed with Fidel, a relationship from which stems the strengthening of the Havana-Caracas axis. Officially exalted (and widely exposed to Venezuelan audiences), the connection to the island has been manipulated as a way to legitimize the administration among popular sectors. Oddly, we read that at the end of Fidel’s first official visit to Venezuela, a presidential decree ordered all TV network stations to broadcast live as the Cuban leader departed from the Caracas Maiquetía airport.

Ultimately, those images preannounced the launching of a new political order. One that seems to set Venezuela on a troubled path, trapped in a querulous past, and in pursuit of an erratic international course.