[Cincinatus' Wife]

Thanks, Hugo! President of Venezuela deserves free-market award***It's time to nominate Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chávez to the ''Milton Friedman Award'' for his indefatigable work to advance the cause of free-market policies and political harmony in the developing world.

I'm not kidding. No other head of state has done so much in such a short time to wreck his country's economy, and to discourage his neighbors from engaging in the kind of finger-waving populism that has brought about massive capital flight and record poverty levels in Venezuela.

If it weren't for the disastrous performance of Chávez's ''peaceful revolution,'' Brazil's new leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would have probably launched the anti-free market policies he had championed for the past three decades, several foreign diplomats and politicians told me during a recent trip to Brazil. And Ecuador and Argentina probably would have followed suit.***

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Engagement has failed in Cuba***With the blood of three executed Cuban boat-jackers barely dry and the voices of 75 imprisoned freedom activists freshly silenced, some Cuba-engagement advocates are restarting their misguided campaign to loosen U.S. economic sanctions against Fidel Castro.

These engagers continue using the cliché that the ''40-year embargo'' has failed and argue that engagement can still help reform Castro's brutal dictatorship. But recent history clearly has demonstrated that engagement has been a policy failure.***