Cuba - Saddam and Fidel are birds of a feather

Despite existing half a world apart, Iraqis and Cubans have many things in common. Both are ruled by autocratic tyrants, both are poor and hungry, both must watch what they say about their leaders and both are denied ordinary human rights.

With the world's attention focused on the war in Iraq, Fidel Castro appears to be taking the opportunity to make life even more difficult for Cubans who don't agree with him. In recent days he has been clamping down on their activities and making dozens of nighttime arrests on trumped-up charges.

Pro-democracy dissidents, journalists and intellectuals are being seized at gunpoint and their homes searched. Some face 20-year sentences for their alleged crimes. Castro has also forbidden U.S. diplomats to travel freely about the island.

In tribute to the human spirit and the natural longing of people for freedom, Cuban dissidents have grown more outspoken of Castro's rule, even as many in the United States have sought to improve relations with Cuba.

But the two movements are at cross purposes. Last year 11,000 Cubans were brave enough to put their names to a petition (the Varela Project) calling for a referendum on free speech, election reform and private enterprise in Cuba. Former President Jimmy Carter cited the Varela Project as a positive development for Cuba during his visit with Castro last year. But Castro has not acted on the petition other than to make arrests.

Meanwhile, some members of Congress, thinking they detect traces of kindness developing in the aging Castro, are seeking to have the U.S. embargo of Cuba lifted.

They should look again. Conditions for pro-democratic Cubans are worse than they have been during the past decade. Instead of softening, Castro is showing that he is still made of iron.

Fidel Castro - Cuba

Hugo Chavez - Venezuela

Chávez's Bolivarian Circles in South Florida - 17 around U.S. - Spreading around world *** Circle leaders draw strength from what they say is a growing Bolivarian international network. The U.S. circle members will hold their first national assembly in New York in March, and Chávez representatives from Venezuela plan to attend.

The Venezuelan government also will host an international Bolivarian Circle meeting in April in Caracas. ''There are circles in Bilbao, Madrid, Denmark -- all over the place. It's really neat,'' said Guillermo García Ponce, Chávez advisory committee coordinator, in an interview with The Herald in Caracas. He acknowledged that South Florida has become an anti-Chávez stronghold. ''I suppose [the Miami circle] will have to keep a low profile,'' García said.

Anti-Chávez activists say they do not oppose the presence of a Bolivarian Circle in Miami as long as it doesn't instigate the violence they allege the circles have caused in Venezuela -- a claim Soto and others deny. ''The government has allowed the Bolivarian Circles to attack the newspapers, attack the reporters,'' said Raúl Leoni, a Venezuelan opposition leader who lives in Weston. ``The fact that you win an election doesn't make you eternal if you're not doing your job correctly.''

……………..The Bolivarian Circles -- along with Chávez's controversial 1999 ''Bolivarian constitution'' -- are part of his overarching ``Bolivarian Revolution.'' Some 70,000 circles exist in Venezuela, made up largely of the working class. Typically, they meet weekly and engage in humanitarian projects such as providing food for the poor -- with military financing -- and building schools. Critics compare the circles to Fidel Castro's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.***

I think it would be a better idea if we compared them to terrorists!

Authorities investigate terror link - Venezuelan al-Qaida operative***Hazil Mohammed Rahaman, 37, a Venezuelan who studied in Saudi Arabia to become an Islamic spiritual leader, raised suspicions because his passport showed he had spent the past three years touring countries that included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan, Venezuelan officials and investigators said.

Scotland Yard and secret police here are now combing bank accounts, telephone records and other travel documents to determine whether Rahaman, who also suffered from serious depression, might have been part of an al-Qaida cell seeking to launch a surprise attack from an unexpected base: South America. "This is a very complicated, very delicate investigation," said a Venezuelan government official involved in the inquiry. "We are looking to see what links he had" to terrorist groups.

Latin America's loose borders, weak legal systems and poor regional cooperation have long allowed some areas to become minor havens for activities linked to international terrorism. Venezuela's Margarita Island, a tourist destination with a large Arab population, has been identified as a source of funding and site of money laundering for the Hezbollah and Hamas militant groups.

Investigators say Rahaman has ties to the region where the borders of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet. Local Arab traders there are accused of sending millions back to Hamas and Hezbollah. U.S., Argentine and Israeli authorities believe the area was the launching site for bombing attacks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, against the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and a Jewish community center in 1994 that left 86 dead. Brazilian federal police also said recently that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaida chief of operations and Sept. 11 mastermind who was arrested earlier this month in Pakistan, visited the triple-border region at least twice in the 1990s. And in 1999, police captured an Egyptian terror suspect affiliated with al-Qaida who established himself at the triple border in order to set up a network there, according to Argentine intelligence documents.

Rahaman had phone contact and other ties with suspected extremists in the triple border region, a U.S. official said in an interview. It is not clear whether Rahaman traveled to the area, the U.S. official said. Investigators in Europe and Venezuela have not yet determined what Rahaman's target might have been, the U.S. official said. But if he turns out to have been part of an al-Qaida operation, it would mark the first time the group has tried to launch an attack from Latin America, raising fears of a new front in the U.S. government's war on terror just hours from Miami. U.S. law enforcement officials are monitoring the case, but have not opened an official investigation.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads the Washington office for Rand Corporation, noted that al-Qaida's Web site was paid for from a Caracas-based bank account for a brief period last year. Al-Qaida "may see Latin America as an area where nobody is looking for them," Hoffman said. "They see breathing space and room to maneuver."

Rahaman was arrested Feb. 13 when British customs inspectors found a hand grenade in a large duffel bag as he was leaving the baggage claim area at Gatwick airport. He had flown to London on a British Airways flight that originated in Colombia and made stops in Caracas and Barbados. Rahaman was charged with three counts under Britain's Terrorism Act and remains in custody. ***

December 29, 2000 - Fidel, Saddam and Hugo --An improbable but growing friendship of three military revolutionaries International Herald Tribune [Full text] The improbable but growing friendship of three military revolutionaries - Fidel Castro of Cuba, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela - poses a challenge to U.S. interests and to President-elect George W. Bush. It is a friendship with considerable power: Venezuela and Iraq are among the top 10 oil exporters. Cuba is a beneficiary of their largesse and, in Venezuela's case, a mentor of revolution.

Meanwhile, United Nations economic sanctions against Iraq, imposed after the Persian Gulf War nearly 10 years ago, and the four-decade U.S. embargo against Cuba, following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, are crumbling. Allies and U.S. businesses are increasingly violating or ignoring both embargoes, and there is nothing Washington seems able to do about it. Earlier this month, the UN Security Council overrode U.S. objections and released $525 million from its Iraqi oil fund for use in upgrading Mr. Saddam's oil industry.

The Castro-Hussein-Chávez connection is anti-American and anti-capitalistic, but not in an ideological way. What matters to the three is domestic power built upon a base of nationalism that they believe legitimizes their policies

In a way, this bizarre trio represents the rebirth, a half century later, of the kind of nationalist populism spawned by General Juan Perón in Argentina and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. Mr. Castro and Mr. Saddam gained power through armed revolutions; Mr. Chávez, a paratroopers' lieutenant colonel, was democratically elected in 1998, after serving time for trying to overthrow the government in 1992.

Mr. Chávez is the most intriguing new leader to emerge in Latin America since Mr. Castro - and he is the lynchpin between Mr. Castro and Mr. Saddam. Although Cuba had been sending doctors and health workers to Iraq for years, there had not been any major contacts between the two countries until Mr. Chávez appeared on the scene. This fall, Mr. Chávez became the first democratically elected foreign head of state to visit Iraq since the Gulf War, ostensibly to invite Mr. Saddam to a summit of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. But it also was an in-your face gesture toward the United States.

With France and Russia, two of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, determined to see the sanctions against Iraq ended, the United States can do little to prevent them from withering away. Mr. Saddam has no intention of allowing UN weapons inspectors back into his country, and he knows that renewed bombing of Iraq is out of the question. Confident that the United States and the British would not risk shooting down a civilian airliner in the southern or northern "no-fly" zone, Mr. Saddam has resumed regular domestic commercial flights for the first time in a decade.

Iraq has the world's second-largest reserves of oil, after Saudi Arabia, which it exports legally under UN controls and smuggles out on a huge scale. Mr. Saddam is not short of cash for whatever adventure next occurs to him, and, with Mr. Chávez, he can influence the international oil supply and its prices.

As for Venezuela, a main source of U.S. imported oil, Mr. Chávez has been raising his profile within OPEC, having presided in Caracas in late September over a summit of that organization. Late in November, Mr. Saddam showed on two occasions what he can do to the oil market when he briefly threatened to halt the shipping of oil, a move Mr. Chávez knew about beforehand.

The Iraqi link is one aspect of Mr. Chávez's international involvements that the United States must not underestimate, with Cuba playing a central role. Since he took office in February 1999, Mr. Chávez has proclaimed his "identification" with the Cuban revolution. He visited Havana and entertained Mr. Castro in Caracas for five days last October. Mr. Castro treated Mr. Chávez as a son, an attitude seldom displayed by the Cuban leader toward any young people. During that same visit, Mr. Chávez granted Cuba large crude-oil price discounts, as he has done selectively elsewhere in the Caribbean, and agreed to help complete building a Cuban oil refinery.

Mr. Castro is Mr. Chávez's guide in the art of gently and gradually introducing authoritarian government to Venezuela. Mr. Chávez abolished the Senate and established a unicameral Parliament whose members support him. He has a new constitution, approved by a simple majority of voters in a referendum, that grants him considerable power.

To complicate matters and his relations with the United States, Mr. Chávez has been openly supporting leftist guerrilla movements in neighboring Colombia. The rebels control big swaths of Colombian territory, along with numerous coca plantations. Washington has already committed $1.3 billion, mainly in military aid, to the eradication of both guerrillas and coca plantations. This could foreshadow a big U.S. commitment in Colombia and an eventual conflict with Mr. Chávez that may interfere with the flow of oil north from Venezuela. [End]

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