Egypt Through the Eyes of Castro-Chavez

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 14



By Anna Mahjar-Barducci in Hudson New York:

The Uprising in Egypt as Seen by Caracas and Havana

Venezuela and Cuba blame the US for the uprisings in the Middle East. The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that the role and the interference of the US were "shameful." These words, however, came after a conversation with his "friend," the Libyan Leader, Muammar Gaddafi, a champion of violating human rights.
After the turmoil in the Middle East, Chavez was apparently worried, and called his other friend," the President of Syria, Bashar Al-Assad, who recently cracked down violently on protesters, himself. In July 2010, Assad for the first time visited Caracas, where he received the warmest welcome. "Viva our brother Assad! May God enlighten him and give him a long life in this battle that he adopted for dignity", Chavez said, presumably more interested in the stability of dictatorships than in the stability of the Middle East.

The Cuban Leader, Fidel Castro, apparently decided to tackle the uprisings in the Middle East in his op-eds, called "Reflections of Fidel." According to Castro, the fate of the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, is sealed. Castro then went on to blame the United States for both the fall of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and the mass demonstrations in Egypt. The problem for Castro is that Washington backed the new liberalism in Tunisia and turned Cairo into its principal ally in the Arab world. Further, he accused the US of "Machiavellian conduct," which "includes supplying weapons to the Egyptian government, while at the same time USAID was supplying funds to the opposition." No comments were made on human rights violations in the Middle East, or on the uprisings, perhaps to evade comparisons with the Cuban regime. State-run media in Cuba and in Venezuela have so far given only until limited coverage on the crisis in Egypt and in Tunisia.