Castro's Comeback

Anyone who doubts that symbolism matters to the Latin American left need only have looked last week to Venezuela, where fire-breathing President Hugo Chavez forced several critical changes to the country's flag through a pliant legislature. The new banner will incorporate a machete, bow-and-arrow and tropical fruits and flowers, to acknowledge the nation's peasantry. From it will shine eight stars instead of seven--the last added as a homage to Venezuela's 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar. And most important, a galloping white horse that once faced right--"into the past," according to Chavez--will now look, naturally, to the left.

So, too, does much of the region today, from Brazil to Bolivia. And the symbol that has benefited most from the new perspective is not a horse, but the left's reigning lion in winter, Fidel Castro. Not so long ago the Cuban leader, who will turn 80 this summer, seemed a shrinking figure on the Latin American stage. As recently as 2002 Chavez was his only ally in the hemisphere; his neighbors widely regarded him as a Stalinist dinosaur whose heyday had long since passed. But since then, Castro has experienced a remarkable resurgence. Chavez and new Bolivian President Evo Morales openly hail him in speeches; Havana was Morales's first port of call in his post-election tour of foreign capitals this winter. Even more mainstream leaders, including Argentina's Nestor Kirchner and Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are no longer afraid to grip-and-grin for the cameras with the Caribbean strongman. "The map is changing," a pleased Castro exulted after Morales's December victory.

How it's changing is the question--and the answer says as much about the supposed strength of Latin America's leftward tilt as it does about Castro himself. Fidel's comeback began a year ago when the European Union, at the urging of Spain's left-wing President José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, lifted diplomatic sanctions it had imposed on Cuba in the spring of 2003 to protest a sweeping crackdown on internal dissidents. Moderate governments in Uruguay and Panama restored full diplomatic relations with Cuba later in 2005, and Castro scored a diplomatic coup at a recent summit of the 15-nation Caribbean Community. Leaders there issued a communiqué calling on the Bush administration to extradite a jailed Cuban exile accused of masterminding the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane in 1976.

An unabashedly pro-Cuba documentary about the U.S. trade embargo premiered in Buenos Aires in November with the backing of the Argentine government's film institute. And these days even an openly right-wing, Bush-friendly president like Colombia's Alvaro Uribe Velez can see the benefits of having a working --relationship with Cuba. Late last year he accepted Castro's offer to reopen peace talks in Havana with one of Colombia's leading Marxist guerrilla factions.

The Cuban leader can thank his traditional betê noire, Washington, for much of his bolstered reputation. "In the last decade we've paid less attention to Latin America than we should have," says Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. "Castro is a big beneficiary." The Bush administration's bring- 'em-on approach to foreign affairs has inspired visceral scorn across the region--and a grudging respect for the one leader who consistently rails against America.

If the sorry state of the Cuban economy remains a black mark against Castro, he can always blame it on the longstanding U.S. commercial boycott of the island. Elsewhere, many in the region believe they are seeing no greater benefit from the market-oriented policies aggressively promoted by Washington and have been throwing out pro-U.S. politicians in election after election. The Bush administration's clear distaste for Morales--expressed openly during his failed bid for the Bolivian presidency in 2002--certainly boosted his campaign this time around. "To a certain degree the Americans have abetted the political career of Evo," says Bolivian political analyst Carlos Toranzo. "They seem incapable of understanding the changes that are happening in Latin America."

Still, castro's return to respectability contains a hefty dose of irony. In the 1960s Havana funneled arms and equipment to communist guerrilla movements in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries in a fruitless bid to spawn like-minded regimes across Latin America. In the 1970s Castro supported the Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua, and in 1980 he helped broker the union of El Salvador's five guerrilla armies, who were fighting to overthrow a U.S.-backed military-civilian junta. By contrast, all of Latin America's left-of-center leaders today, apart from Castro himself, have gained power through the ballot box instead of the barrel of a gun. "Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Uruguay's Tabaré Vázquez are democrats," notes Harvard government professor Jorge Dominguez. "It is very important not to confuse them with Castro because they really do believe in competitive elections and the free exercise of public liberties."

Many of those leaders now clearly praise Castro for their own purposes. In the current political climate, a photo op with the graying patriarch of the Latin American left can go a long way toward establishing a president's credibility with his more militant followers. Brazil's Lula, for instance, took a giant step toward ending Cuba's diplomatic isolation in 2003, when he visited Havana during his first year in office. That trip took place at a time when the Brazilian leader faced mounting criticism at home that he was reneging on campaign pledges to boost economic growth and aid the country's poor.

Such gestures are made easier by Castro's weakness, not his strength. "Many of these newly elected governments don't see Cuba as an adversary," says William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert who heads the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington. Cuba no longer has the funds or the energy to foment revolution; now it exports doctors and nurses to its neighbors.

Because Cuba has defied consistent efforts by the United States to isolate it, the country does retain an aura of independence that many Latin American nations, buffeted by waves of globalization, believe they've lost. But none feels any great need or pressure to emulate the Cuban example economically. Mexico, which once cultivated close ties to Cuba and is host to the region's second biggest economy, is in fact one of the few major countries that has not warmed to Fidel; ties have remained frosty ever since Mexican President Vicente Fox condemned Cuba's human-rights record and asked Castro to leave a U.N.-sponsored summit in the city of Monterrey one day before the arrival of George W. Bush.

Indeed, the enduring Castro mystique in some Latin American circles has always been rooted more in attitude than ideology. In the 47 years since he overthrew a pro-U.S. dictator, only Nicaragua's Sandinistas tried to copy elements of Castro's socialist model--and that effort was a half measure at best. Chavez to date has shown no appetite for expropriating the assets of foreign energy companies operating in Venezuela, and in the run-up to his Inaugu--ration, Morales backed off from earlier talk of nationalizing Bolivia's natural-gas and oil industries. "These new presidents who like to pay their respects to Fidel are not products of him," says Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born director of Florida International University's Latin America and Caribbean Center. "Their rise is largely rooted in domestic factors, and Fidel is less of a main driving force."

The current crop of Latin America's left-wing leaders is distinguished more by a rhetorical concern for economic inequality than for drastically different economic policies. Michelle Bachelet may be a card-carrying member of Chile's Socialist Party, but following her Inauguration last week as her country's first female president she promised to maintain the same free-market economic policies that have made Chile the darling of foreign investors in the region. Lula has adopted prudent economic policies since he took office three years ago, and his government recently paid off the country's outstanding debt to the International Monetary Fund. So too did Argentina's Kirchner, a radical Peronist militant in his youth who has presided over three consecutive years of impressive growth since taking office. "There is no real risk of another Cuba," argues Lula's predecessor Fernando Henrique Cardoso in his newly published memoir, "The Accidental President of Brazil." "No country in Latin America wants to follow Cuba's path anymore."

Small wonder. Cuba today is a shabby showcase for socialism. Two major hurricanes in 2005 exacerbated the island's housing shortage of 500,000 units, and many Cubans publicly grumbled last summer over the worst spate of electrical blackouts in recent memory. Warning his listeners that "this country can self-destruct," a worried Castro announced in November yet another crackdown on rampant corruption and a thriving black market fueled by chronic scarcities of consumer goods. And as if he didn't have enough on his septuagenarian mind, the Cuban leader is constantly having to deny persistent rumors about his health, fanned by a recent CIA report suggesting that he is suffering from Parkinson's disease. As an icon for the left, Fidel Castro is enjoying a rare moment in the sun. The same can hardly be said about the society he created, or the appeal it retains beyond the shores of his native land.