His first visits abroad were to Baghdad, Tripoli, and Teheran. His friendship with Castro is both personal and concrete: in accordance with a 2000 agreement, Venezuela provides 50 percent of Cuba's oil imports, some 53,000 bpd, with 25 percent of the cost payable over 15 years and a two-year grace period-all of which amounts to a vital lifeline to Cuba's dismal economy. Castro has paid a long visit to Venezuela (reminiscent of his three-week visit to Allende's Chile) and provides doctors (which Venezuela does not need) and experts on internal security (which the Chávez regime does need), including some involved in the formation of the "Bolivarian circles," a local copy of Cuba's infamous Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Like the CDRs, the Bolivarian circles are basically mobs of the unemployed, unemployable and social misfits paid and armed by the government.
To make his ideological allegiances and the threat he poses to regional stability clearer, Chávez' security services are actively cooperating with the Colombian Marxist-Leninist terrorists/narcotrafficantes of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia - Ejército Popular (FARC-EP), including providing arms, safe havens and transit facilities-at least according to the Colombian government and high-ranking defectors from the Venezuelan military.
All of this raises a crucial issue regarding the Chávez regime's chances of surviving: the loyalty of the armed forces. Indeed, with his popularity in the 20-percent range among all social and economic sectors of the population, including the poor and disadvantaged he is supposedly championing, it is becoming clearer by the day that Chávez' ability to stay in office, just as Allende's before him, is almost completely dependent on the military.
The problem is that the Venezuelan military has a dislike of Castro and Castroism that goes back to the early 1960s, when Fidel and his sidekick Che Guevara prepared and led a failed insurgency against the recently established democratic government in Caracas. And although in April 2002 segments of the military briefly removed Chávez from power, only to have others bring him back, the country's almost total militarization in recent months-the armed forces have taken over the oil fields, ports, and police armories in Caracas, the transportation and distribution sectors, etc.-increases the stress on an institution that has had no decisive political role since the 1950s. Chávez' habit of appearing in public ceremonies with the generals in his lieutenant colonel uniform, rather than as the civilian supreme commander he is supposed to be by the Constitution, does not help with the military's institutional pride-or speak well for his political judgment.***