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If you were waiting to see who Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is supporting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, it looks like you're going to be disappointed. Chavez sat down for an informal interview last Thursday with a group of visiting American newspaper editors and refused to bite:

Of the American presidential candidates, Chávez said, "It would be a lie to say I have no preference." But "I shouldn't say anything that would be used against someone."

The 20 editors spoke with Chavez for about 90 minutes on topics ranging from baseball (He's a Yankees fan, ironically.) to his relationship with Fidel Castro. He also stressed that the bombastic anti-American rhetoric he has used in the past is directed at the U.S. government, not ordinary Americans, and certainly not his friends in Hollywood:

I beg for forgiveness if in my speech I've hurt any feelings back in the States. I ask for forgiveness. When I speak about the United States, I do not refer to the people, to the citizens. I refer to the elite that is governing the United States - and not even referring to all of the elite governing the United States. Because we have friends among the elite governing the US. The economic elite, we have friends. We have friends among the cultural elite of the United States . . . Danny Glover. Kevin Spacey came over here. Sean Penn. Those are my friends, close friends . . . And when they come over here, they say what they like and what they don't like. And we still are friends. And that's what we want. We want to be friends. And I hope that with the new government we can then open new space for exchange - and discuss.

Chavez isn't getting too cozy though. He still worries about the U.S. invading to steal his country's oil wealth and is looking into buying more weapons from Russia to guard against this threat. He was also pretty evasive when asked about whether he planned to leave power when his term runs out in 2013, saying, "I don't think the Venezuelan people, at least part of the people, would allow me to get too far away from politics."

With his arch-nemesis on the way out, Chavez may be hoping to boost his appeal to the American population. But given how integral the image of Chavez as a third-world underdog railing against North American neoliberalism is to his appeal and legitimacy in Venezuela and throughout Latin America, it seems unlikely that he would ever get to friendly with the U.S., no matter who's sitting in the White House.

The folks at Cuban Transition Project at the University of Miami have a handy chart on the shocking extent of Castro family involvement in the Cuban regime. Raúl is just the tip of the iceberg, my friends:

During the past few years family members of both Fidel and Raúl Castro have come to occupy important positions in Cuba's government. This Castro clan represents in addition to the military, the security apparatus and the Communist Party, a significant force in Cuba's political and economic structures.

Here's the list:

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart

Relationship: Fidel Castro's son

Position: Advisor, Ministry of Basic Industry

 

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Col. Alejandro Raúl Castro Espin

Position: Raúl Castro's son

Position: Chief, Intelligence Information Services, Ministry of the Interior; Coordinator, Intelligence Exchange with China

 

Jorge Rey/Getty Images

Ramón Castro Ruz

Position: Fidel and Raúl's oldest brother

Position: Advisor, Ministry of Sugar

 

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Dr. Antonio Castro Soto

Position: Fidel Castro's son

Position: Investment Chief, Frank Pais Hospital. Doctor for Cuba's baseball team

 

ALEJANDRO ERNESTO/AFP/Getty Images

Major Raúl Alejandro Rodríguez Castro

Position: Raúl Castro's grandson

Position: Raúl Castro's military guard in charge of his personal security

 

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Deborah Castro Espin

Position: Raúl Castro's daughter

Position: Advisor, Ministry of Education

 

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Mariela Castro Espin

Position: Raúl Castro's daughter

Position: Head, Center for Sexual Education

 

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Marcos Portal León

Position: Married to Raúl Castro's niece

Position: In charge of nickel industry, member of the Central Committee of Cuba's Communist Party

 

No pictures available:

Col. Luís Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, Raúl Castro's son-in-law

Chief Executive Officer of Grupo GAESA (Grupo de Administración de Empresas, S.A.) which supervises military enterprises

Alfonsito Fraga, Related to Raúl Castro

Ministry of Foreign Relations

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The French-Swiss-Spanish humanitarian mission to Colombia has apparently collapsed. There had been hopes the FARC rebel group would at least permit the mission's members to visit and treat ailing hostage Ingrid Betancourt. The former Colombian presidential candidate, who holds French citizenship, has been in captivity for five years. In rejecting the mission, a FARC spokesman placed the blame squarely on Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, whose military recently dealt the FARC a harsh blow.

We profoundly regret that while we were making palpable progress for a prisoner exchange, President Uribe planned and executed the cunning murder of comandante Raul Reyes, mortally wounding the hope for a humanitarian exchange and peace."

The failure of the mission is lamentable and the plight of the FARC hostages is tragic. Still, the high-level French attention to the issue is remarkable. President Sarkozy has declared himself ready to jet to the region if necessary to secure Betancourt's release. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner regularly wrestles with the details of the case. Betancourt's case has become a cause-celebre, and French politicians may simply be responding to the French street, but the sight of France's leaders hanging on the utterances of FARC guerrillas must have de Gaulle spinning in his grave.

This week’s Tuesday map comes to us from a billboard controversy south of the border.

Created by advertising agency Teran/TBWA and launched a few weeks ago in Mexico, the Absolut billboard ad depicted pre-1848 North America -– before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo turned Mexican territories into what is now the American South West.

The campaign was obviously intended for a Mexican audience, as Favio Ucedo, creative director of a top Latino advertising firm, explained:

Many (Americans) aren’t going to understand it. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county -- I don’t know if they know much about the history… Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly, and I don’t know how they’d take it.”

But Absolut quickly learned just how some Americans would take it: not well.  Although the ad never appeared in the U.S., it was picked up by American media outlets, causing a flurry of complaint from U.S. citizens (some more creative than others).

As of Friday, Absolut’s maker Vin & Spirits had decided to withdraw the apparently offensive advertisement even though it "was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility... [and was] in no way was meant to offend or disparage, nor...advocate an altering of borders..."

FILE: Mark Penn; Win McNamee/Getty Images

I must admit, I'm puzzled as to why it's supposed to be such a big deal that Hillary Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn (right) met with Bogotá's ambassador to Washington about the controversial U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The key point to remember about this and other FTAs in Latin America is that they're much more about politics than they are about economics. Ninety percent of U.S. imports from Colombia have already been entering the United States without any tariff, thanks to prior agreements. Peterson Institute analyst Jeffrey J. Schott estimated in 2006 that any welfare gains (GDP boost) from a U.S.-Colombia FTA would be positive, but "relatively small" -- roughly half a percentage point for the Colombians, and a negligible amount for the United States. If anything, the agreement is about lowering Colombia's tariff barriers to U.S. goods, solidifying trade relations, and lowering the risk that President Álvaro Uribe's successor will have a different economic philosophy. So, claims by U.S. labor activists that the FTA would be bad for U.S. manufacturers are little more than dishonest fearmongering.

That said, I'm not on board with U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab's hyperbole, either. Can it really be that the dangling FTA, not the drug war, is the root of Latin America's problems today?

Leaders in the hemisphere and Latin America have said that the single most destabilizing factor in Latin America today may be the U.S. Congress's failure to ratify the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That is more destabilizing today than anything that Colombia's neighbor Venezuela is doing or threatening to do— and that is saying a lot.

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Evo Morales, Bolivia's populist president, has signed up with a minor league soccer team in La Paz.

The 47-year-old will be a reserve player for the team Litoral, which hopes to earn a spot in Bolivia's top professional league next year. Morales was once a standout player for a local cocoa grower's team and as president, has been an outspoken critic of the worldwide ban against high-altitude soccer games.

Last week I wrote that the travails of the Cuban national soccer team might make a good Kevin Costner sports movie, but this one smacks more of Will Ferrell to me.

FP Editor-in-Chief Moisès Naím explains:

At first sight, the scandals that brought down Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, and Klaus Zumwinkel, the former president of Deutsche Post (the German corporate behemoth), didn't seem to have much in common. Spitzer fell two weeks ago for hiring prostitutes; Zumwinkel, two weeks before that, for tax evasion. Yet there's a thread that binds them together: money laundering. Both men were brought down by a new system for tracking money that was created in reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—but that has since spread its net far beyond jihadists.

See also Naím's commentary on how Ugly Betty explains the Latin American economy.

Jackson Diehl explains why the U.S. government, for all its criticism of Hugo Chávez and his increasingly damning ties to Colombia's FARC rebels, might not take the next logical step and brand the Venezuelan leader a terrorist sponsor:

[T]he Colombian evidence would be more than enough to justify a State Department decision to cite Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. Once cited, Venezuela would be subject to a number of automatic sanctions, some of which could complicate its continuing export of oil to the United States. A cutoff would temporarily inconvenience Americans -- and cripple Venezuela, which could have trouble selling its heavy oil in other markets.

There are many interpretations of the so-called Bush Doctrine, but as Diehl alludes, confronting state sponsors of terrorism is surely on of its key tenets. When one alleged terrormaster happens to be your third-largest oil supplier, though, such doctrinal edicts tend to get a little fuzzy.

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Hugo Chávez's former defense minister, Raúl Baduel, had harsh words this week for his old boss, who sent Venezuelan troops to the Colombian border over the weekend in response to Colombia's military incursion in Ecuador:

This is a desperate attempt by President Chávez to use the military for political and personal ends, making them participants in an action whose consequences could be disastrous."

In other words, Baduel is accusing Chávez of fomenting an international crisis in order to distract from his domestic political problems. It's a significant move, coming from someone whose personal and professional relationship with the Venezuelan president spans 35 years, culminating with Baduel's resignation from the defense ministry in 2007. Baduel is a legendary revolutionary figure in Venezuela, best known for defending Hugo Chávez during the April 2002 coup attempt, and for his fierce loyalty to the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement that Chávez founded in the 1980s. But as Chávez tried to push through constitutional reforms late last year, Baduel began distancing himself from the president, citing his moral and ethical obligation to point out the harm Chávez would do to Venezuela if he succeeded in centralizing executive power and socializing the economy.

It's good that somebody is calling Chávez to account, because most in the region seem distracted by the accusations being hurled back and forth between Colombia and Ecuador. Colombia claims to have found evidence linking Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), whose leader Raul Reyes was killed in this weekend's raid. Colombian President Álvaro Uribe says that Venezuela has been funding FARC and has pledged to take Chávez to international court for funding genocide. And although Peru's president, Alan García, suggested that Chavez should butt out of the diplomatic row between Ecuador and Colombia, he is also urging Uribe to apologize and avoid setting a bad precedent for sovereignty. As Passport reader joeljournal noted on Monday, though, some would say that propping up a terrorist group in your neighbor's country isn't such a great precedent to set either.

MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images

Antoine van Agtmael, who literally wrote the book on emerging markets, noted the following last year in a piece for FP:

Today, emerging-market countries account for 85 percent of the world's population but generate just 20 percent of global gross national product. By 2035, however, the combined economies of emerging markets will be larger than (and by the middle of this century, nearly double) the economies of the United States, Western Europe, or Japan. The reality of globalization—which is only slowly and reluctantly sinking in—is that outsourcing means more than having "cheap labor" toil away in mines, factories, and call centers on behalf of Western corporations. Yet in the West, business leaders and government officials cling to the notion that their companies lead the world in technology, design, and marketing prowess.

Increasingly, that just isn't so.

When we think of these emerging markets, we tend to think of places like India and China. But the world's biggest emerging market is actually Brazil, according to a new index from Morgan Stanley. So, when will Lou Dobbs start railing against "the great Brazilian menace"?

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If you were were looking for a hard number to sum up the state of Cuba's political leadership, try 70. That's the average age of Raúl Castro and the six vice presidents appointed this past weekend. The acension of these longtime Raúlistas to the top spots in Cuba's government is as good an indication of any that Raúl has no immediate plans for major reform. In a conference call organized by the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American studies, Senior Research Associate Brian Latell characterized Cuba's new government as a "gerontocracy... old men dealing with the possibility of an upheaval and instability among the younger generation of Cubans."

His colleague, University of Miami Assistant Provost Andy Gomez, said his interviews with young Cubans in recent days indicated a disturbing trend of authorities arresting youths on trumped up charges, possibly to prevent major demonstrations. Gomez worries that unless major reforms are undertaken soon, we might soon see a major outward migration of young Cubans to the United States and elsewhere:

I do think that we might see a movement of this young generation trying to leave the island in any possible direction. My concerns here are multiple. First, the United States is in the process of a presidential election. I don't think that this administration or any of the candidates want to deal with a mass migration… The current infrastructure in the state of Florida is not prepared to deal with such a large migration. The state of Florida and the Miami-Dade public schools have [budget] shortfalls. We are just not prepared. This could be a problem for the United States like we haven't seen before.  

It's also unlikely to help alleviate the already toxic state of the U.S. immigration debate. 

The latest news on the Kosovo recognition front is that Bolivia has decided not to recognize the country's independence. President Evo Morales compared Kosovo to the four eastern Bolivian states that are pushing for greater autonomy, a situation we wrote about in December. Morales's ally Hugo Chávez will not recognize Kosovo, either.

We don't yet know how Raúl Castro plans to govern Cuba. Will he cling to the old ways? Or now that his brother Fidel is formally stepping down, will he be more bold in pursuing economic and political reform? And what role will the United States play in this process, especially in an election year with Florida and its Cuban population in play?

Chances are high that U.S. politicians will choose the easy route and continue a policy of isolation that has failed for five decades. But hope springs eternal! Perhaps the United States will choose to engage rather than punish. If that happens, U.S. policymakers will need a strategy. FP Editor in Chief Moises Naim had a perceptive column a few years back on the lessons would-be Cuba reformers need to remember in thinking about how to help that country transition from communist dictatorship to a free society. It still rings true today:

Lesson one: Failure is more common than success in the transition to a democratic market economy. Lesson two: The less internationally integrated, more centralized, and more personalized a former communist regime was, the more traumatic and unsuccessful its transition will be. Lesson three: Dismantling a communist state is far easier and faster than building a functional replacement for it. Lesson four: The brutal, criminal ways of a powerful Communist party with a tight grip on public institutions are usually supplanted by the brutal, criminal ways of powerful private business conglomerates with a tight grip on public institutions. Lesson five: Introducing a market economy without a strong and effective state capable of regulating it gives resourceful entrepreneurs more incentive to emulate Al Capone than Bill Gates.

It is therefore safe to assume that if the Castro regime suddenly implodes, Cuba will end up looking more like Albania than the Bahamas.

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Raul Castro has run Cuba ever since his brother Fidel fell ill in the summer of 2006, so Fidel's announcement today that he is stepping down after nearly 50 years in power is largely symbolic. That said, Fidel continued to pull political strings from his sickbed, and his statement today suggests that he still intends to voice his opinions on matters of state.

FP has long been host to debates on Castro's legacy and what a post-Fidel Cuba might look like. With Raul at the helm, today will look much like yesterday. But Raul is also 76 years old. The machine is surely in motion to find ideological heirs to the Castro brothers.

Don't miss:

Was Fidel Good for Cuba? Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde Diplomatique squares off against columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner over Castro's true legacy.

The Day After: Cuba What happens when Castro falls? (Also in this special package: the day after Kim Jong Il, Mugabe, and Qaddafi.)

Seven Questions for Brian Latell The former CIA analyst and author on what life in Cuba is like under the younger Castro brother.

Seven Questions for Carlos Saladrigas The businessman and outspoken Castro critic discusses Fidel's decline and his homeland's future.

What America Must Do: End the Embargo Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer's advice to the next American president.