Cuban medicine has just taken another hit to its reputation.
Three times in the past few years, Hugo Chavez traveled to the socialist medical paradise to have surgery for his cancer; twice the Venezuelan dictator emerged to declare himself cured.
Now he is dead.
More accurately, now the military dictatorship he instituted is willing to announce he’s dead. It speaks to one of the driving forces of this regime — anti-Americanism — that hours before announcing Chavez’s death, the nation’s vice president accused the United States of having somehow poisoned him.
At times, his regime’s cartoonish accusations led Americans to dismiss Chavez as a flamboyant clown. That was a mistake.
Abroad, Chavez made common cause with America’s enemies. Several times he visited Tehran. At one point, he pledged that Venezuela would “stay by Iran at any time and under any condition.”
At home he was even more of a menace to his own people. Over the years, he expropriated their private property, closed down TV stations that dared criticize him, supported terrorists attacking neighboring states and stood by as crime and inflation made Caracas one of the saddest and most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere.
Alvaro Uribe, the pro-US president of Colombia, was one of the few in the region with the guts to take on Chavez. At one regional meeting after Chavez threatened to stalk out, Uribe addressed him this way: “Be a man! You’re brave speaking at a distance, but a coward when it comes to talking face to face.”
On earth, Chavez combined the instincts of Fidel Castro with the wherewithal given him by his nation’s oil reserves. In death, our hope for the long-suffering citizens of Venezuela is that they use this opportunity to bury this regime along with its leader.