By Muriel Pilkington
The local Voice
For the life of me I can’t understand the Foreign Minister’s obsession with Cuba, when everything in his professional career as a diplomat points entirely in the opposite direction. Before Zapatero gave him the top slot in foreign affairs in 2004, Miguel Angel Moratinos’s first posting abroad was as First Secretary at the Spanish Embassy in Yugoslavia (1979-80), then he took over as Chargé d'affaires from 1980 to 1984. He picked up his working knowledge of Russian and Serbo-Croatian here – he’s fluent in English and French, having married a Frenchwoman. In 1984 he moved on to Morocco, where he was the political adviser at the Spanish Embassy in Rabat until 1987 when he was posted back to the ministry in Madrid. He was Deputy Director General for Northern Africa (1991-93), then Director General of the Institute for Cooperation with the Arab World (1991-93) and ended up as Director General of Foreign Policy for Africa and the Middle East (1993-96). In 1996 he was appointed Spain’s ambassador to Israel. At the end of his stint there, the EU appointed him as its special representative for the Middle East Peace process.
And not a whiff of Cuba or other lands West in all this. Perhaps, like so many of us in those heady days of the 1960s, he was an ardent admirer of Che Guevara. (In the summer of 1967, my then Spanish fiancé and I were figuring out how to raise the money to join Che’s guerrilla force in Bolivia. Thank God we couldn’t, or I probably wouldn’t be sitting here writing this.)
Of course, Fidel was our revolutionary God in those days, an illusion finally shattered in the late 1970s when Venezuelan guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo swore to me that it was Fidel who ordered the Bolivian Communist Party to betray Che’s whereabouts – on orders from Moscow. The Russians hated Che with a passion because he made no secret of the fact that he despised them for betraying the original ideals of the Russian revolution.
Fidel is still around making mischief for the Americans and his most ardent admirer outside of Latin America seems to be Moratinos. He has spent the past six years trying to convince the EU to soften its stance on Cuba – only limited emergency aid until Cuba improves its human rights record – and Cuba’s release of 20 political prisoners in the past two weeks has encouraged him to renew his mission with a vengeance. In front of the cameras, Moratinos is usually pretty non-committal, making his statements in a calm, diplomatic way. But the other day, when announcing the imminent arrival of the first batch of freed Cuban dissidents, he got carried away – predicting that Cuba's promise to release dozens of political prisoners over the next four months would improve its relations not only with the European Union but with the United States as well. In the latter case, he said Cuba’s move could eventually lead to the lifting of the long-standing US embargo against the island.
I hadn’t seen him so excited since he accused former PM Jose Maria Aznar and George W Bush of being behind the April 2001 coup attempt against Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. I was living in Caracas at the time, and what really happened was that a march by protesting national oil company workers was fired on by soldiers as they approached the presidential palace. The march was being filmed live and it was quite obvious that the marchers were not armed. Nineteen were killed and at this point, the military high command abandoned Chavez and arrested him. They let him go less than 48 hours later when the interim government consisting of businessmen suspended the Constitution. Admittedly Aznar and Bush would have welcomed Chavez’s removal from the scene, as would 70% of the Venezuelan people at the time.
Since then, through trickery, bribery and downright election fraud, Chavez and his minions have managed to destroy the Venezuelan economy, driving hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans into exile. He is now beating the drums of war against Colombia which claims to have evidence that he is harbouring Colombian guerrillas on the Venezuela side of the border – but he’s been doing that since he took power in 1999. Moratinos is keeping quiet this time around, having finally learned that Chavez will twist the truth every which way to back his claim that the US is trying to overthrow him. Now he’s threatening to cut off oil supplies to the US, boasting that his army is ready take on – and beat - the Colombian and US armies.
Of course it’s all a load of hot air. Unlike the Colombian military, the Venezuelan military have no experience in the field, and if all Chavez’s soldiers are like the ones shown in the photo, Colombia and the US have very little to fear from his “People’s Army”.
- Virtual Newspaper
- Weather Forecast