Another coup (almost literally) for Castro was the election of Luis Inacio Lula da Siva as president of Brazil in 2002. Though he campaigned as a moderate, Lula has been a Castro ally for 25 years and has publicly called him "an example to emulate." Lula's Workers Party formed a committee in solidarity with the FARC communist movement in Colombia, as well as a "strategic partnership" with the Chinese Communist Party. When Castro recently arrested and shot a number of dissidents and ordinary people attempting to escape his island paradise, Brazil declined to condemn Cuba and refused to cast a vote critical of this repression in the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
Ecuador, too, is now governed by a pro-Castro radical, Lucia Gutierrez, a good friend of Hugo Chavez's and a beneficiary of Chavez's financial support.
In El Salvador, the FMLN, the communist movement successfully thwarted by Ronald Reagan's support for the democratic center, is poised to make a comeback. Some in the U.S. government have been fooled by the FMLN's transformed rhetoric. But the communist movement is unchanged.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the FMLN sent a letter to the U.S. embassy suggesting that the terror attack was a consequence of U.S. malfeasance, and four days later FMLN leaders attended a celebrations hosted by leftists in San Salvador in which Osama bin Laden was praised and the U.S. and Israeli flags were burned.
The Forum of Sao Paulo is Castro's worldwide alliance, and its members are quite a rogue's gallery. In addition to the heads of state mentioned above, the Forum also includes the Provisional IRA, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Baath Party, and representatives from Libya, the Tupac Amaru guerrillas in Peru and assorted other terror organizations. Also represented are the communist parties of the remaining "dead-enders" of the communist world -- China, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea.
This is Castro's new empire -- and it cannot be shrugged off. Even a dying scorpion still has poison in its tail.