VENEZUELA: The presence of health and literacy advisers from Cuba has delighted some and alarmed others, writes Michael McCaughan in Caracas.
Venezuela's powerful opposition lobby denounced the "communist invasion" of their country this week, as Cuban doctors and teachers fanned out around the country, spearheading literacy and health programmes. Television commentators fumed at the notion that oil-rich Venezuela would stoop so low as to import doctors and teachers from an impoverished Caribbean island.
One newspaper speculated that the Cubans were combat veterans in disguise, come to fight alongside President Hugo Chavez should he be ousted from power. Matilde Gomez, a young woman living in the Petare district of Caracas, assured me that Chavez had printed a million passports for the Cuban visitors, entitling them to vote for their benefactor in a mid-term recall referendum.
The only Venezuelans who didn't seem to mind the alleged invasion were the poor citizens living in shacks on the hillsides of Caracas, enjoying the company of a trained doctor living in their community for the first time ever.
Nirvando Perez was busy attending a queue of women holding feverish children in the San Jose barrio this week, while several elderly men coughed loudly in the background. The young Cuban doctor held his clinic in the front room of a modest home volunteered for the purpose.
One woman explained how the pills she had been given for insomnia no longer worked. Perez asked her questions about her lifestyle, ferreting out details of stress and marital separation, then suggested the woman stay off the pills and consult a psychiatrist instead.
On a stroll through the vast, working-class San Jose neighbourhood, Dr Perez gestured at rubbish left uncollected outside homes and explained that the main focus of the Cuban health mission was to "indoctrinate" neighbours in the need to establish a clean, healthy environment.
The Cuban health system has been exported worldwide, operating from Guatemala to South Africa, under right- and left-wing regimes, going where local doctors refuse to go. "The Venezuelan doctor expects a big salary," health minister Maria Urbaneja told The Irish Times this weekend. "They have no interest in working in a poor neighbourhood for a health service which pays a pittance."
Ever since President Chavez assumed office in December 1998, he has fostered close ties with the Cuban regime, describing the people of both nations as "swimming in a sea of happiness" toward a better future.
Chavez signed a deal to sell oil to Cuba at a preferential rate, while making frequent visits to the Cuban leader, who has provided invaluable advice on how to stay in power under extreme pressure. The Venezuelan president placed an urgent call to Havana during the April 2002 coup attempt, hours before he was detained by dissident troops. "You are too young to die," Castro allegedly told him, "Don't do an Allende on it," added the Cuban leader, referring to Chilean president Salvador Allende, who died fighting dissident troops during the 1973 coup which brought Augusto Pinochet to power.
If the Cuban doctors weren't enough to keep the opposition agitated last week, a second group of Cubans arrived into the country to lead a literacy campaign aimed at reaching over a million citizens.
The Cuban literacy programme once more ignited the ire of the opposition, who claimed the visitors intended to indoctrinate their pupils and turn them into steely-eyed Stalinists.
The new arrivals will need to work hard to achieve such a goal, as a grand total of 74 Cuban literacy experts are overseeing the work of 50,000 Venezuelan literacy volunteers, implementing a three-month programme based around family ties and popular games. Cuban President Fidel Castro not only offered the videos for free, but he also presented the Venezuelan government with the 50,000 television sets and video recorders required for the project.
"Every education system has an ideological bias," explained Roberto Flores, an education ministry official, "but up until now it has been the church and the upper classes who have dictated the nature of the bias."
President Chavez is steadily shifting the nation's economic and political centre of gravity away from its historic dependence on the US and toward a multi-polar perspective which would reserve a special place for the EU, Latin America and the OPEC nations.
When Chavez assumed office in 1998, his only regional ally was the ageing Cuban leader; but Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador have since elected centre-left leaders committed to food security above corporate investment, and state sovereignty over traditional subservience to US foreign policy demands.
Josefina Montiel, taking her first steps toward writing her name, summed up the mood among those putting pen to paper for the first time: "I want to be the person I'm not", she said proudly, taking a firm grip of her pen.
Venezuela, on a larger scale, wants to be the country it isn't: healthy, educated and independent.