In recent days, traditional Cuban dictator Fidel Castro entered an editorial to the Gramka Communist Party newspaper, claiming that the US (i.e. the Bush administration) is attempting to drain food and energy supplies from the Third World by focusing agricultural and environmental/alternative energy initiatives on developing ethanol for biofuel purposes. While this re-entry into Cuban political media may be a sign of Castro's improving health, it does not seem to bode well for his skill at diagnosing regional and world affairs.
These comments come in light of President Bush's recent tour of often-overlooked Latin America, the keynote of which was an accord with the booming Brazil to create more trade of ethanol biofuel. Granted, there are worthy criticisms of this accord. First, much of the corn used to create this biofuel is grown on lands cleared of depleting rainforests. Also, Castro argues, the US is giving itself an unfair advantage over many Third World countries where water supplies are depleted and cannot grow corn as can the vast US resource of arable land. Eventually, Castro sees the US trying to overpower the world energy market and entrap needy countries in a corn-based neocolonialism. This is strategically timed, he claims, with the US military threat of invasion of Iran and Britain's arrogant diplomatic affront to Iran in the capture of its 15 sailors and marines driving up world oil prices.
However, Castro seems to reflect his own fading power with these comments. He has passed the torch of Latin America's socialist/populist ideological leader to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who seems focused on building an alliance of defiant non-Western powers (especially Iran, with whom Venezuela has recently drastically increased its arms trade to become even more militarized than Pakistan in trade volume). Such a movement seeks to replace the ambiguous non-aligned movement during the Cold War led in Latin America by the nonetheless Soviet-supported Castro.
Castro and Chavez's anti-US and anti-Western campaigns, however, do not monopolize Latin America's populist leaders. For, while Bolivia and Chile have followed Chavez's lead, Brazil has quietly overtaken much of the Third World in economic development under the more balanced populist approach of popular president Luis Salvo de la Silvia (affectionately called "Lula").
Hopefully, despite the legitimate environmental points addressed by Castro in regards to arable land in the Third World (which must be addressed by a Lula-like balance of capital investment and populist market policies to educate and implant infrastructural reforms to Third World water and agricultural systems), more balanced political and economic energy with come from throughout the world to discourage the abrasiveness of the West and its antagonists, like the fading Castro.
Nature is indeed a powerful and uncontrollable force, as corn rocks world politics.
