''Clearly it is in the Cuban government's commercial and economic interests to have Chávez remain the president of Venezuela,'' said Kavulich, who compares a possible Chávez loss to the end of Soviet subsidies to Havana in 1992.
The loss of Moscow's subsidies, estimated at $4 billion to $5 billion a year in the 1980s, created an economic crisis that forced Castro to adopt some free-market policies, open his doors to tourism and legalize the use of U.S. dollars in the early 1990s.
''Venezuela has clearly replaced the USSR in terms of the commercial and economic element,'' says Kavulich. ``Without Venezuela, Cuba would not be able to maintain its current commercial, economic, and political systems. There would have to be some changes.''
The deep friendship between the two leaders was underscored by Chávez's recent decision to dispatch his brother Adán to Havana as Venezuela's ambassador.
While Chávez has said that Cuban-style communism would not work in Venezuela, he has nevertheless famously exclaimed that the two nations are ``swimming together towards the same sea of happiness.''
Chávez also has pursued a series of other Cuba-style political initiatives, such as land redistribution and the creation of ''Bolivarian Circles,'' pro-government groups of civilians, some of them neighborhood-based, some of them said to be armed.***
I was reminded this week of how Castro so artfully used Mr. Carter when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez took a page from his Cuban mentor's playbook. On Monday, the Carter Center along with the head of the monumentally meaningless Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, endorsed Chávez's claims of victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum, rather too hastily it now seems.
The problem was that the "observers" hadn't actually observed the election results. Messrs. Carter and Gaviria were only allowed to make a "quick count"--that is, look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines. They were not allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered.
If there was fraud, as many Venezuelans now suspect, it could have been discovered if the ballots didn't match the computer tallies. The tallies alone were meaningless. The problem was clear by Tuesday but it didn't stop the State Department spokesman Adam Ereli from chiming in. "The people of Venezuela have spoken," he proclaimed.***