The Chávez Doctrine

As the Latin American Caesar lay dying, his trusted triumvirate kept up its bedside vigil. For over a year and a half the political powerbrokers of a post-Chávez Venezuela often left behind the business of the state to attend to their Comandante-in-Chief, cancer-stricken in Cuba.

After his fourth and final unsuccessful surgery in December, President Hugo Chávez was allowed few visitors. In his final days, only his family and closest confidants had inside access: On his left sat the strongman Diosdado Cabello, old comrade-in-arms, head of the National Assembly, whose loyalty to Chávez has been tested time and again. To his right stood Nicolás Maduro, perhaps the first bus driver to ever become Foreign Minister and then Vice President of any nation. At his feet, but holding the reins of a burgeoning aid empire, knelt Rafael Ramírez, Energy Minister and President of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the country’s oil company and cash cow.

Fidel and Raúl would hobble in and out of the hospital room too, but their presence was always felt. Indeed, it was here in Havana, counseled by the Castros, where President Chávez made the most important political calculation of his controversial career: how to determine who should succeed him, and take up the torch of the incendiary Bolivarian Revolution. In the end, the Herculean—possibly Sisyphean—task fell on the Vice President who, as “the son of a union leader” and an organizer himself, makes for a rather anti-aristocratic Augustus.

The influence of (grand)father Fidel on the coronation of Nicolás Maduro cannot be underestimated. Maduro is said to lean harder to the left than the rest of the chavista central circle, and he too pays court to the Castros, against the silent alarm of some supporters—and the violent vitriol of opposition members—who view the ideological intimacy with the communist octogenarians as a constraint on the contemporary New Latin American Left. Yet Maduro recognizes that the Cuban connection is only one component of a grander scheme, the dawning of the double-edged Bolivarian socialist dream: to integrate economically and politically all of Latin America, and to counter the influence and imperialism of United States foreign policy in the region. The Chávez Doctrine is either the anti-Monroe Doctrine, or the modern Monroe Doctrine—it depends on your historico-political perspective. 

All of the integrationist initiatives championed by Chávez, though, are still in their infancy. The Bank of the South (BancoSur), a development fund for the region headquartered in Caracas—that is, the anti-World Bank and -IMF— was incorporated back in 2009 with $20 billion in capital contributions from Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Venezuela. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)—the anti-Organization of American States (OAS)—was formed in 2011 to promote independence from the U.S. and, provocatively, none other than Raúl Castro was appointed as its chairman in January.  Similarly, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), established in 2008 after the EU model, intends to introduce a South American parliament, passport and currency—the latter a countermeasure to the trade hegemony of the U.S. dollar. For Venezuela and Latin America in general, it seems, the Bolivarian political project is long-term.

For Cuba, however, the Venezuelan link is not just a prophetic vision—it’s an immediate lifeline. The relationship between Hugo and Fidel consisted of more than late-night lessons in political philosophy and the occasional game of dominos. As El Jefe reinforced yesterday in a column for Granma, the state newspaper, Hugo Chávez was the best friend that the Cuban people ever had (and I bet El Che is rolling in his mausoleum). There is no doubt that the Cuban regime, and the entire Cuban economy, depend desperately on the charity of Chávez. For example, the unsustainable subsidy of 120,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan crude oil meets 50% of the demand for petroleum products on an island with just over 11 million inhabitants. In total, according to economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, the country receives annually around $13 billion in preferential trade, aid and investment from Venezuela—more than twice the assistance that the Soviet Union provided Cuba at its pinnacle in 1985. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are some “within the Venezuelan elite who are less convinced of the merits of subsidising Cuba…at a time when inflation and debt are soaring in Venezuela itself.” In order to pre-empt such protest, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez decided that Nicolás Maduro was their best bet to further the fused fantasies of their forebears José Martí and Simón Bolívar.

Regardless, without its architect and anchor, chavismo is no longer a homogenous movement. President Chávez was able to unite the rhetorics of nationalism and socialist internationalism, and so he developed a diverse base of support within his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). If President Maduro wants to consolidate his own power, he will have to contend with or co-opt key personalities, not least of whom is Cabello, an aggressive nationalist with ties to the “bolibourgeoisie,” corrupt cronies who have profited from the culture of impunity that marked the Chávez years. Others also pose potential problems, like the new Vice President Jorge Arreaza, a close confidant of Chávez and his son-in-law, or loyalist military leaders like Admiral Diego Molero who, the opposition insists, is “Hugo Chávez’s Defense Minister, not Venezuela’s.” No one knows if Maduro has enough caudillo in him to channel Chávez and leverage his leadership into a madurismo, the maturation of what is still an evidently embryonic Bolivarian Revolution.

Sworn in after the funeral on Friday, caretaker President Maduro will also stand in the snap election on April 14. For the time being, the chavistas must remain united, at least through the next few months and days, or they risk giving the reactionary opposition frontrunner Henrique Capriles—who in October lost by almost 11 points the presidential race against Chávez himself—a chance to win, and then they’d all be out of a job. Catastrophic for Cuba, the Capriles camp has vowed that under his administration, Venezuela“will not give away oil to anyone.”

Thus, the inevitable in-fighting within the PSUV will not have its greatest impact in Venezuela, where the permanent public display of an embalmed Chávez will serve as a constant reminder of his domestic policies—he will forever be a specter over the country. A weakening of chavismo would actually first affect foreign policy, most conspicuously in Cuba, where integration and (inter)dependence have already been inextricably entrenched. Any reduction of Venezuela’s commitment to their special relationship would mean a return to levels of economic adversity most Cubans had hoped they’d left behind in the Special Period of the 1990s.