The World

Cuban President Raul Castro (left) welcomes Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to Cuba last Friday for cancer treatment. Photo: AP

One of the more interesting lines of speculation about Hugo Chávez’s deteriorating health and possible death is what it might mean for the socialist Venezuelan president’s many foreign allies. These include Cuba and Nicaragua in the Venezuelan near abroad, to further-flung friends in Syria and even China.

By opposition estimates, Mr Chávez’s government has disbursed some $80bn in grants and subsidies since 2005, much of it
ideologically-driven gift-giving to friendly Latin American nations. On top of that largesse, Venezuela has also bought some $5bn of arms from Russia, and borrowed over $30bn from China in return for supplies of oil. This month, a Venezuelan oil tanker also called at the Syrian port of Baniyas in the midst of the popular uprising against Bashar al-Assad.

Most of Mr Chávez’s allies can cope with a change of regime in
Caracas. But not communist Cuba. An end to its $5bn of annual
Venezuelan aid, equivalent to about a quarter of Cuban GDP, would produce at the very least a severe recession.

When I met last month in Havana with pro-democracy blogger Yoani Sanchez, she thought this would force Raúl Castro’s government to push ahead faster with its limited market reforms. Now, though, she seems to have changed her mind. Ms Sanchez tweeted last week that it could lead to a second “special period” – the severe belt-tightening and political crackdown in Cuba that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Both of Ms Sanchez’s scenarios are equally plausible – which
highlights again how so much of the musing about Mr Chávez’s health is just speculation layered on top of more speculation. For one, nobody really knows how ill Mr Chávez is, except for his Cuban doctors. (And maybe not even them, as shown by a clutch of recent WikiLeak emails from Stratfor, the US security consultancy.)

Even so, speculation can bring about concrete changes in the real world.

It may only be a coincidence, but this Sunday the Marxist FARC guerrillas that operate in neighbouring Colombia said they would release some of their remaining hostages and desist from civilian kidnappings – all as an opening to possible peace talks with Bogotá.

It is too much to call the Farc “allies” of Mr Chávez. Still, in the recent past they have enjoyed his tacit succour and support.

By offering an olive branch to the Colombian government, might even the Farc – who are shrewd and canny enough to have kept an insurgency going for 40 years – also be preparing for a post-Chávez future? It is an intriguing thought.