- HAVANA (Reuters) - The leaders
of Cuba and Venezuela relished their roles as Washington's bad boys in
Latin American on Friday and vowed to build a socialist alternative to
U.S. policies in the hemisphere.
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- President Fidel Castro and the younger and equally loquacious
Hugo Chavez mocked Bush administration charges that their burgeoning partnership
threatens to undermine democracy in Latin America.
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- "I'm realizing that your friendship is hurting my
image," Castro joked to Chavez during a meeting with hundreds of free
trade opponents from across the Americas.
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- The Bush administration's former point man for Latin
America, Otto Reich, recently called Havana and Caracas the region's "axis
of subversion" and accused Chavez of squandering Venezuelan oil wealth
to prop up Castro's 46-year-long rule.
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- "With the combination of Castro's evil genius, experience
in political warfare and economic desperation, and Chavez's unlimited money
and recklessness, the peace of this region in peril," Reich wrote
in an article.
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- Castro, 78, read out Reich's words to a delighted audience
in Havana's Karl Marx theater.
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- Among the attendees were Bolivian coca farmer Evo Morales,
whose peasant movement helped oust a U.S. ally from the presidency in 2003,
and former Salvadoran guerrilla Shafik Handal, leader of the Farabundo
Marti Liberation Front.
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- "If we are speaking of an axis, that axis is spreading
in all directions and turning into masses of people that are rising up,"
said Chavez, who has aligned his oil-exporting nation with Cuba since his
election in 1999.
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- Appealing to poverty-stricken Latin Americans disillusioned
with the promises of free-market capitalism, Chavez last year countered
the troubled U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) with his
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA, also Spanish for dawn).
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- DEATH OF THE FTAA
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- The FTAA was due to come into existence in January, pulling
down trade barriers between every country in the Western Hemisphere except
Cuba. But talks have been bogged down since 2003 by differences between
the United States and Brazil.
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- "We must congratulate (Secretary of State) Condoleezza
Rice for the death of the FTAA. The FTAA is dead, the ALBA is coming,"
declared Castro, calling her "Condolence" Rice.
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- Castro called the FTAA a U.S. plan to dominate Latin
America and plunder its resources through multinational companies.
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- The only country that has joined ALBA is Cuba, which
has turned to Venezuela for oil to pull up a cash-starved economy crippled
by the demise of the Soviet Union.
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- Experts on Latin America said Chavez's ALBA was little
more than a two-man club unlikely to gain ground, even among Latin American
nations with left-leaning governments such as Brazil and Argentina, which
have other priorities.
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- "ALBA is mainly a vanity plate for Chavez to help
bolster his image as a regional leader," said Daniel Erikson of the
Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy group.
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- "It provides further grist for the Latin American
left but does little to offer substantive solutions to the region's economic
woes," Erikson said.
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