Havana, 5 March 2024 - Rarely have the people of Cuba felt such affinity with a foreign leader as they did with Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, that empathy awakened when he uttered the phrase "for now" in 1992.
Then the prison that made him mature as a revolutionary came, the visit to Cuba and the meeting with Fidel, the friendship between the two leaders and the coincidence in the way of seeing the national and Latin American political and economic processes, as well as the identification of the needs for unity and cooperation that became a programmatic platform and subsequent realisation.
Millions of Cubans were linked in one way or another to the relationship between Cuba and Venezuela founded between Chávez and Fidel through cooperation in health, sport, culture, education, energy saving, agriculture and the training of Venezuelan social workers in Cuba.
One remembers his vibrant speeches at large rallies of the Venezuelan people, even in the rain, or the phrase "it smells like sulphur" when he arrived at the podium at the United Nations where the President of the United States had spoken earlier.
It was thought he would last forever. However, fate had other plans in Chávez's life, to turn him into an icon, a paradigm, at the early age of 58, just after he had founded a party in hiding (MBR-200), the V Republic Movement, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and relaunched the concept of Socialism of the 21st Century.
The loss of Chávez for the Latin American left, for the Venezuelan and Cuban people meant no less than an unexpected and painful fatality: the loss of a leader at the peak of his performance as a politician and statesman. There is always the question of how far he could have gone, of what Latin America would be like today if Chávez were still around. So much was lost that it is better to remember him as "Cuba's best friend".
(Cuban Embassy in South Africa-Prensa Latina)