How left is Chávez?

Posted in PaulHampton's blog on ,

Three comments from Chávez in London this week that might help some of his cheerleaders sober up:

I put it to Chávez that under him, Venezuela has all the good things about Cuba - the great schools and hospitals - without the revolting things - dictatorship, censorship, repression. "I don't think in Cuba there is a lack of freedom of speech," he says with worrying speed. " If you approach Cuba from the perspective of the Western world, you might think so. But there, you have the people who express themselves on many matters. There is no repression in Cuba."

Really? What would he say to the Cubans jailed just for running private libraries, or to Vaclav Havel, who calls Cuba "the biggest prison on earth"? "What you have in Cuba is a very specific model of revolution. We are very respectful of the revolutionary people of Cuba and its institutions. In the grassroots in Cuba, there are constant elections that take place. Is it true that by electing a President or Prime Minister every five years you have democracy? Is it because you have press and TV channels that you have freedom of speech? There's a lot of cynicism behind that. So many lies behind that. Every country has its own model."
(An audience with Chávez. Interview By Johann Hari, The Independent, 16 May 2006)

I grimace. What about Robert Mugabe? Does he regret calling him a " freedom fighter"? "He is my friend. I think he has been demonised too much. Have you met him?" No, I say - but I have met many of his victims. "We all make mistakes. I think you should interview Mugabe yourself so you have a better idea who he is and what he's about. You have to understand history of colonialism in Zimbabwe against the black people, he wants a world where people are equals without racism, that's my opinion."
(An audience with Chávez. Interview By Johann Hari, The Independent, 16 May 2006)

Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's socialist president, remembers "with great affection" the day he went to see Queen Elizabeth II in 2001. "There's something I'll never forget. When I got out of the car at the entrance to the palace, I spotted a coin lying on the ground and picked it up, and saw it had her face on one side. So I took the coin," he says. Once inside, he presented the Queen with his official gift, a glass model of waterfalls and forests in Venezuela and a multi-coloured bird. Then he took out the coin and handed it to her. "She kept it," he laughs, as he recounts the story in an interview with the Guardian yesterday, sitting beneath a portrait of 19th-century South American would-be liberator, Simón Bolívar - he ordered his staff to put up the picture - in his suite at London's Savoy hotel…

On this visit he failed to drop in on his old friend the Queen. "But I'd like to take the opportunity through your paper to greet her and congratulate her on her 80th birthday." Referring to his great ally, Cuba's president, Fidel Castro, he says: "She and Fidel are more or less the same age." The Queen and Castro have never met, so would he be the intermediary who could bring them together? "The two boys and the girl," he grins. "She is so young. I saw her on TV and she looks so fresh."

(The world according to Chávez, Jonathan Steele and Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, May 16, 2006)

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