[Cincinatus' Wife]

Castro's Venezuelan Piracy*** THE FLIGHTS FROM HAVANA GO TO RAMP NUMBER 4 at Maiquetia Airport 25 miles from downtown Caracas, a ramp re-designated for military use by Venezuela's Marxist President Hugo Chavez and exempt from the usual customs controls or inspections.

On September 29 alone, six flights brought 950 Cubans, mostly males in their 30s and 40s. These "Cubans travel without caring about their belongings, which are loaded directly from the planes to the trucks of the mayor's offices," reported the journal El Universal on November 18. "The load is guarded by National Guard officers."

In this nation that once had a free press, the tightening grip of the Chavez dictatorship has forbidden the photographing of this airport influx of operatives from his friend Fidel Castro's Communist police state.

"The use of TV cameras as well as the presence of journalists from any mass media is prohibited," reported El Universal. "Nevertheless, a few photojournalists have managed to catch images from landings, defeating security controls."

Between September 26 and October 27, this journal reports from its sources that 11,530 Cubans arrived in Venezuela on 76 such flights. Chavez's seizure of one television station and threats against the rest of the press have reduced such critical news coverage of his regime.***

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Julianne Malveaux: King's legacy lives on - in Venezuela***Although King is an icon of the civil rights movement, he hardly belongs only to African- Americans. As he underscored in his Nobel Peace Prize speech when he asserted his "audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits," King championed all people living in poverty worldwide.

I was delighted, therefore, when I traveled with others from the TransAfrica Forum to celebrate King's birthday in Caracas, Venezuela. We went with Minister of Education Aristobulo Isturiz to open a school named after King. It's among more than 3,000 "Bolivarian" schools created since Hugo Chavez became Venezuela's president in 1999. The schools, open all day, provide two meals and a snack to poor children.

There's also a new Bolivarian University, which increases higher education's availability, especially to poorer students. Further, more than a million adults have taken literacy classes in the past two years.

Chavez has taken his message of economic justice from Venezuela to the whole of Latin America. He opposes a free-trade agreement for the Americas and suggests that a development fund be established to help poor Latin American countries withstand economic oscillations and eliminate poverty.

Not surprisingly, Chavez and George W. Bush have clashed because of their different views of Latin American economic development. Chavez, for instance, appropriately described national security adviser Condoleezza Rice as "illiterate" about Latin American politics and economics.***