Can Castro create bloc of leftist nations?

WASHINGTON -- Even as violence explodes across the Middle East, this week we mark another violent and senseless attack of many years ago, one close to the United States -- one that stands as a paradigm for revolutionary change in today's world.
It was July 26, 1953, that gray early morning of Fidel Castro's attack on the Cuban military's Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack against the Batista dictatorship was a slaughter, with Fidel's romantic but doomed boys and girls ending up in pools of blood while their & quot;jefe & quot; escaped to the mountains.
Surely Moncada was one of history's most crazy and definitive defeats. Though the iron-willed Castro persisted and came to power six years later, today his & quot;revolutionary & quot; Cuba is impoverished, an economic basket case.
Lessons from Cuba
And yet, we might learn more about what is happening before history's eyes in the Middle East by studying what came next with that political magician.
Only two months after the disastrous attack, Fidel was being & quot;tried & quot; in the Santiago Palace of Justice. He entered in a normal suit, then demanded that he, a lawyer, be permitted to be his own attorney. He put on the barrister's black robes. Soon, with tactical brilliance, he had turned the entire trial around. Now HE was trying THEM, and he ended his peroration with the famous & quot;History will absolve me! & quot;
The trial has gone down in history as the beginning of Castro's domination of much of the world's revolutionary imagination. It has also become a prime example of how a political alchemist turns the tables on every accepted premise of society: Stability was bad, revolution was good; democracy was evil.
Castro at 80
As Castro prepares for his 80th birthday on Aug. 13, his melodramatic alchemist's act at the Moncada trial has new life, even as his own life moves toward an inevitable end.
When we look at Latin America, which has been woefully neglected as this administration has fixated on the Middle East, we see distinctly disturbing developments. Presidencies have been falling like dominoes to a pro-Castro far left: Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega (yet again) in Nicaragua, etc. But now there is more to it.
One of the Bush administration's favorite convictions was that we would show ourselves so powerful in W's endless wars that no country or grouping of countries would dare to stand or unite against us. This was, and is, particularly the idea of our dour Vice President Cheney.
Leftist bloc in Latin America
But now, in addition to new groupings of Russia and the Central Asian states and the European Union, we find the distinct beginnings of a new leftist bloc forming in Latin America, until now one of the most divided and divisive regions on Earth. In fact, Chavez's oil-rich Venezuela and Nestor Kirchner's Argentina are aiming to establish what is in effect a new International Monetary Fund for Latin America, with a & quot;bond of the south & quot; of $2 billion from Venezuela to be used as a down payment to finance future infrastructure projects.
It is the first step & quot;in the construction of a bank, a financial space in the south that will permit us to generate lines of finance, & quot; President Kirchner said only recently in Buenos Aires. His words followed a meeting in which Venezuela was accepted into the until-then distinctly inactive Mercosur trade bloc and customs union of the southern countries. Chavez had already purchased nearly $3 billion in Argentine bonds in January, allowing Kirchner to pay off and cut ties with the omnipotent IMF. Free of the & quot;americanos, & quot; at last!
And who should show up in Argentina but the Cuban President Castro, praising his close ally, Hugo Chavez, and stating that Mercosur's sudden move toward leftist integration & quot;has centuries-old enemies that are not happy. & quot; Cuba has also joined the standardization of trade among Mercosur's five full members -- Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela -- and associate members Chile and Bolivia. Mercosur is effectively a trade pact that now encompasses 270 million people and accounts for 75 percent of South America's gross domestic product.
Now, very few people still believe that Mercosur, or the poor economic thinking of its new leftist leaders, stands as any dangerous opponent to the IMF or the United States. But it is a new character in the play, and it stands opposed to American free-trade deals with Colombia, Chile and Peru. Indeed, President Chavez dreams of a & quot;Merco-America & quot; stretching from Mexico and Cuba to Patagonia. One notices who is left out.
Universal Press Syndicate