Socialism or Death” in Venezuela

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 16, 2007

January of 1989 was a particularly grim month for Cuba’s communist regime. An enfeebled Soviet Union was promising to make peace with the West and threatening to suspend aid -- Cuba’s economic lifeblood -- to its client states. Communism was everywhere on the defensive. Sensing the changing tide, Fidel Castro gave an impassioned defense of his dictatorship, then already 30 years old, committing Cuba to a fight to the finish, to “socialism or death!” The record of Castro’s crimes, its death toll likely stretching into the tens of thousands, has now revealed this to be a distinction without difference.

Fast forward to January of 2007: In Venezuela, Castro’s reverent student, Hugo Chavez, seems determined to follow in his path. In a line that must have warmed the heart of the decrepit tyrant in Havana -- assuming he is still alive -- Chavez last week committed his country to Castro’s course: “Fatherland, socialism or death,” Chavez declared, “I take the oath.”

It is rare for authoritarians of the Left to show their true colors so vibrantly. But where in the past it was possible to dismiss Chavez as a standard-issue demagogue, a charge his September bloviating at the United Nations about “the devil” President Bush did much to bolster, the latest developments make a compelling case that Chavez is what he always said he was: the next Fidel Castro.

We must not allow ourselves the luxury of thinking that this is an isolated incident. What happens in Venezuela will impact not only the US directly but inderectly as it impacts the rest of Latin America. -mm