Chavez Needs U.S. and Castro

Sovereignty does not reside in spewed words at public rallies or irate declarations in front of television cameras. Sovereignty is based upon the strength of a nation’s institutions, economy, and a society that permits it to autonomously determine its own course and confront the intentions of external interference by powers or simple provocation.

How can President Chavez’s urgent need to call upon political advice from the ex-president of Cuba, Fidel Castro, identified by Chavez as the father of all revolutions, qualify? Perhaps a country is sovereign when it needs another country to explain how to formulate a law of “Intelligence and Counterintelligence”? What’s Castro teaching about how to organize revolutionary defense committees? What’s he saying as to how to behave on the international stage, and in particular, how to manage the tense and difficult situation created by an inefficient and useless interference in the internal issues of Venezuela’s sister, the Republic of Colombia? Should a state be qualified as sovereign when its President is kept by an external praetorian guard?

At the same time, how can the sovereignty of a country be defended when it is more dependant every day on the exportation of only one product – petroleum – of which the great majority is destined for the same country – the United States – which is repeatedly qualified as the “empire” from which all evils of the world come? Or how can a country be considered sovereign when it cedes part of its maritime waters to obtain support in the Organization of American States of the Caribbean Community?

Venezuelans of every ideology have to reflect about the consequences of this “dependentist” policy that brings real governments to an end. Ample resources derived from petroleum income are not enough to create a sovereign nation. Rather, in the last ten years, the revolutionary regiment has created a schizophrenic country that is dependent on the economy of the United States and the political ideology of Cuba.