Fidel Castro’s Venezuela obsession

It was simply unprecedented: the virtual invasion of a larger, more powerful country by a smaller, weaker one at the larger country’s behest. Cuban methods for stamping out the free press and snuffing out dissent very gradually began to spread throughout Venezuela.

Cuban infiltration of Venezuelan state institutions — both military and civilian — was complete, with Cuban “advisers” watching over virtually every single office, institute, ministry, barrack and embassy of the Venezuelan state. Reporting directly back to Havana, this web of spies led to a bizarre situation where Castro often had a clearer intelligence picture of what was happening inside the Venezuelan state than the Venezuelan state itself. Chávez, by all accounts, simply trusted Castro’s spies more than he did his own.

In 2011, the Machurucuto incident cycle was completed when Fernando Soto Rojas, one of just three guerrillas who lived to tell the tale of the 1967 invasion, was elected speaker of Venezuela’s National Assembly. An aging communist without much of a political machine of his own, he had ridden his Cuban revolutionary street cred to the pinnacle of the Venezuelan state.

Later that year, when Chávez fell ill with cancer, the full extent of his devotion to Castro was revealed as a matter of life and death. Though the world’s premier cancer specialists in Brazil, France and the United States lined up to offer him cutting-edge treatment, Chávez refused to be seen by anyone other than the Cubans. Absent for long spells in a Havana hospital, Chávez’s health became a state secret — and a Cuban state secret, at that. Castro had detailed knowledge of Chávez’s condition when nobody in Caracas did.

If there’s one maxim Castro was devoted to throughout his life, it’s the idea that knowledge is power. Knowing Chávez’s cancer was terminal months before anyone else did allowed the Cubans the decisive edge in the high-stakes jockeying to select his successor.

There was no secret whom Castro favored: Nicolás Maduro may have been a gray, uncharismatic politician, but he was a Fidelista through and through. A former radical bus union organizer, Maduro had come up through the ranks of Liga Socialista, a militantly pro-Cuban fringe party he joined as a teenager. The closest thing to a university education he had came in 1986and 1987 when, as a 24-year-old, he undertook two years of intense ideological training at Cuba’s school of political training, along with communist activists from seven other Latin American countries.

For years as Chávez’s foreign minister, he had never shown the slightest deviation from Havana’s line. Maduro was the man Castro could trust to secure Cuba’s interests in Venezuela after Chávez’s death. And succeed Chávez he did.

In the long history of Castro’s sprawling record of international adventurism — from Nicaragua and Bolivia to Congo, Angola, Israel and beyond — Venezuela is but one chapter.

Success came late, but when it did it was complete. On the day he died, Castro left Venezuela the way he had dreamed since his youth: radically unfree and shackled to a Marxist dictator wholly subservient to Cuban interests.

Dictatorship in Venezuela is Castro’s greatest foreign policy victory, the cornerstone of his hemispheric legacy.