The Castro government in Cuba assumes President Hugo Chávez will die soon and is making its plans accordingly, moving rapidly in a state of full alert. Cuba’s priority is to shore up the ailing leader’s power at any cost. When Adán Chávez, the Venezuelan president’s brother, became aware early on of the ailing chief executive’s cancer, he returned from Cuba and declared that supporters of Chávez’s revolution must prepared to defend it by any means necessary, giving voice to Havana’s desperate strategy.
It was all too predictable. Raúl Castro and his brother have good reason to fear that Chávez would take the Cuban revolution to the grave with him. Those 100,000 barrels of oil that Venezuela supplies to Cuba every day, along with fat subsidies, are the regime’s chief means of support. If that current stops flowing, Cuba would find itself in a worse predicament than the situation it faced when the Soviet Union collapsed. That caused the Cuban economy and the supply of goods to consumers to plunge by 40 percent. This would be steeper.
The scenario they fear is likely to play out: The caudillo’s inner circle, taken by surprise, turns to infighting and is swept from power at the polls. That’s what the Castro brothers want to avoid at all costs. No one in Chávez’s clique can attract popular support like the leader himself. Chávez did not create a political party, but rather a circle of sycophants. Whether dead or in a period of prolonged agony, he has no viable substitute. That’s why his brother warned supporters to prepare for the path of violence.
They will try to impose their rule by resorting to force and repression, using Castroite cadres to carry out the mission, more or less in the manner that Moscow used its proxies during the Cold War to dominate captive nations. Far from trying to make a peaceful deal with the opposition, they are going to “radicalize the process,” to use their jargon. They know their own lives and wellbeing are at stake.
The end of collaboration between Havana and Caracas has other grave consequences for the Castro brothers. Some 60,000 Cuban workers are in Venezuela. If Chávez were to lose power suddenly, they would have to be repatriated quickly, and many would opt to stay behind. Plans exist to evacuate them on short notice in a kind of Dunkirk-style operation if that’s what it takes.
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