[Cincinatus' Wife]

Jimmy Carter gets rolled--first by Fidel Castro, now by Hugo Chávez.***When Jimmy Carter went to Cuba in 2002, Fidel Castro reveled in the photo-ops with a former U.S. president. Mr. Carter seemed to think he was heroically "engaging" the Cuban despot. But in the documentary "Dissident," celluloid captures something most Americans didn't see: Castro giggling sardonically as Mr. Carter lectures the Cuban politburo on democracy. That foreshadowed what happened when the media splash ended and the former president went home: Dissidents he went to "help" today languish in gulag punishment cells.

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.***

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Panama leader may pardon 4 Castro foes to spite Cuba***Arias added: ``We are in a very cold period on relations with Cuba. It will be up to the new government to reconstruct a relationship that had been very good until Cuba wrecked it by attacking our president.''

Arias met Cuban Ambassador Carlos Zamora Tuesday morning and handed him a note ordering him to leave. Panama recalled its ambassador from Havana on Monday.

The four men jailed include three Miami exiles and Luis Posada Carriles, an El Salvador resident labeled by Havana as its most wanted terrorist. They were arrested in 2000 in Panama City after President Fidel Castro, visiting for a heads-of-state summit, alleged at a news conference that the exiles were plotting to kill him.

They were cleared of the murder charges and possession of 33 pounds of explosives but were convicted in April of endangering the public safety and given sentences of up to eight years in prison. Posada and the three Miamians -- Pedro Remón, Guillermo Novo and Gaspar Jiménez -- claimed they were in Panama to help a Cuban general who was to accompany Castro and supposedly had planned to defect.

Arias said Cuba had made ''offensive'' allegations that Moscoso was in cahoots with Miami exiles to free the four men. On Sunday, Cuba issued a strongly worded statement threatening to break relations if the four convicts were pardoned.***