Ageing rebel-rouser turns peacemaker

Castro can bring to bear “fundamental” influence to persuade Colombian guerrillas to lay down their arms, the Colombian President said on his arrival, the beginning of a visit of at least five days.

In an effort to bring the Latin American family back together after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the start of the decade, Cuba gave up its role as the spearhead of Communism in the region, without at the same time forsaking its socialist convictions.

“The only place (on the continent) we didn’t stir up revolution was Mexico,”Castro told a group of economists recently. “But in the rest of the countries, no exception, we tried.”

And, he added: “It was against the will of the Soviets. People were accusing the USSR of promoting subversion in Latin America, but the truth was they were dead set against it,”

But last summer, Castro went so far as to lay armed struggle to rest, counselling revolutionaries to “have patience.”

At the graveside of Che Guevara, re-interred in Cuba in 1997, Castro said “not every era, not all circumstances call for the same methods.”

And in 1994 he told a reporter: “I would not recommend armed struggle” when asked about the Zapatista uprising then underway in southern Mexico, and denied that Marcos, the white commander of the Indian movement, was trained in Cuba.

The peace process launched last week in the Colombian jungle is central to the talks between Castro and Pastrana, who now want to join forces to fight international drug traffic.

A major drug ring that used Cuba as a transitpoint to smuggle tonnes of Colombian cocaine to Europe was unmasked recently, showing the urgent need of close cooperation between the two countries.

Venezuela’s new President-elect Hugo Chavez, a former coup leader and occasional poet, as he demonstrated this week in Paris, will join the other two chiefs of state for a Havana mini-summit over the weekend.

Chavez and Castro are the two chiefs of state most likely to persuade the guerrillas to stay at the peace table, say many Colombian observers.

Chavez’ plane will also bring to Havana soap opera actress Margarita Rosade Francisco, awaited ecstatically by Cubans.

But cynics say the mini-summit will exude the smell of oil rather than coffee, pointing to the fact that Caracas and Bogota are two major exporters of the stuff, a fact that make them key in a continent wracked by a financial crisis.

Sure of having history’s last word, which he believes dooms capitalism to collapse under the repeated blows of economic crises, Fidel Castro invited both hisguests to attend a seminar on the international economy he organised for next week in Havana.

Economists from all over the world, 500 of them, took up the Cuban leaders challenge to debate in Communism’s last western bastion the future of a world fallen prey to neo-liberal globalisation.