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We were very happy when we turned out this lead for our previous column: "This week, it is Peru's turn to host the annual Ibero-American summit, which, protected by 22,000 policemen, gathers in Lima 23 heads of state and government, including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Spain's King Juan Carlos."
It was appropriately descriptive and it had the additional punch of highlighting a political paradox. But once again we were shown Castro cannot be trusted. At the last minute he decided not to be part of this convocation, the kind he loves for showing off and proving that, even if he is scorned by the United States, other world leaders have no problem in socializing with him.
Thus, after eleven years of these annual meetings, Castro lost to King Juan Carlos the title they shared of not having missed one of them. Now the Spanish monarch alone gets the gold star for a perfect attendance record.
However, Castro will be glad to know that, in a perverse way, his absence proved to make more news that he might have probably made had he been present.
For several days now, devote followers of the convoluted Cuban political scene-yes, it's a dictatorship, but politics obtain in dictatorships too-have been scratching our heads while we try to figure out why Castro remained in Havana while everybody else was strutting in Peru's capital.
The line officially put out by the Cuban regime was that, much to his regret, the "comandante" cancelled his trip to Lima due to the "work and important and intense commitments derived from the latest hurricane, Michelle, that has been the greatest natural disaster suffered by Cuba in 100 years."
This explantion was dismissed out of hand by diplomats and poltical pundits.
"There may be a number of reasons, but I tend to think that Fidel did not want to face the risk of standing isolated in this summit, that had an agenda that basically ran against his positions, particularly in its political and economic content," said a Latin American foreign minister over a scotch here in New York. Reminding us that Castro has presided over an international meeting that took place in Havana two weeks ago against the planned Free Trade Ageement of the Americas and that he has criticized the Democratic Charter recently signed at the Organization of American States, the diplomat said: "He threw the towel. It's quite obvious that, given the unanimous backing to both topics by the region's rulers, Castro was out of place in Lima."
Others spin finer yarns to explain his absence.
In Lima, Cuba's vice president, Carlos Lage, took pains to deny that Castro's absence had anything to do with Peru's government decision to award the highest Peruvian decoration, the medal of the Order of the Sun, to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, well known for his anti-Castrismo-which president Alejandro Toledo presented to him at a banquet for the summit participants.
In expressing his thanks for the award, Vargas Llosa showed his satisfaction for Castro's absence, noting that "for the first time in its history the summit is held with the presence of only democratic chiefs of state and of government, born from free elections, freedom and legality."
Cuba's vice president Lage gave assurances that Havana didn't know of the Peruvian president's intention to bestow this honor on the writer and that Castro decided not to be at the summit only two days before it started, "so the two events were unconnected."
Our take?
We happen to buy Cuba's party line, which we got in spades early this week from Cuban U.N. mission officials at a lunch scheduled well in advance of the Lima events.
The Nov. 4 hurricane was devastating-with a force of four in a scale of five-and flattened thousands of homes, cut off electricity and other crucial services for days, and severely damaged crops earmarked both for export and local needs.
Moreover, Michelle came on top of an already critical situation, with Cubans suffering from the ever-deteriorating economy and the acute drop in the life-saving remittances of relatives and friends in the United States who are going through a recession of their own.
No matter how much he could be out of line with other summit participants or how many anti-castristas were honored in his presence, Fidel Castro would never pass up an opportunity to play the world leader in the company of other chiefs of state, except . . .
. . . Except if he felt that the present domestic crisis has such dangerous political overtones-and he is a past master at making this kind of judgement-that he had to stay in Havana to steer it to a safe haven. The question, however, is whether, at 75 and after 42 years in power, this old hound's legs are as good for the chase as his nose is for smelling trouble.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com