POSTSCRIPT: Hugo Chavez (1954-2013)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/postscript-hugo-chavez-1954-2013.html

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"I met Chávez a number of times over the years, but the first time I saw him was in 1999, shortly after he had become Venezuela’s President, in Havana, Cuba, giving a speech in a salon at the University. Both Castro brothers were in attendance—a rare sight—as were other senior members of the Cuban Politburo. Fidel Castro looked on and listened raptly as Chávez spoke for ninety minutes, essentially laying out the rhetorical groundwork for the intense and deep relationship between the two countries, and the two leaders, that was soon to follow. That day, a number of observers present in the room commented on what appeared to be a major bromance between the two. They were right. Chávez, younger than Fidel by nearly thirty years, soon became inseparable from the Cuban leader, who was clearly a father figure and a role model. (His own father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, and his mother, Elena Chávez Frías, were poor primary-school teachers in the Venezuelan interior. Hugo was the second of six sons, and joined the Army when he was seventeen.) And for Castro, Chávez was an heir and something like a beloved son. Uncannily, or fittingly, it was Fidel who noticed Chávez’s discomfort on a visit to Havana in 2011, and insisted that he see a doctor—who promptly discovered Chávez’s cancer, a tumor described as the size of a baseball somewhere in his groin area. Since then, and until he returned home in February, terminally ill, Chávez received virtually all of his cancer treatment in Havana, under Fidel’s close scrutiny."

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