Another After Dinner Illness?

It was reported today that Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez had gone to Cuba for medical treatment of an undescribed intestinal treatment.

Eh quoi? Venezuela has no hospitals of its own? Venezuela is not exacty the Ivory Coast, after all. So the question that leaps to mind is: why Cuba?

The evident answer is that Chavez does not trust medical treatment elsewhere. Certainly Paris or the Mayo Clinic are world famous medical facilities that are at the disposal of the famous of the world; why would Chavez not go to such a facility? The only inference is that, because such facilities are all within the long arm of states and interests hostile to Chavez's administration, he does not trust them and prefers treatment at the hands of tried and true ideological comrades.

But is it truly necessary to fly to Havana for a more or less routine procedure? Certainly any doctor anywhere has the means and the skill to kill any patient within his reach. A jab or a swab with any number of known substances will do. In fact, to put it simply, some state's secret service can certainly find a susceptible chamber maid to slip arsenic into a bottle of aspirin.

The fact that Chavez has flown to Cuba implicates a more serious condition, with potential complications and which -- like the intestinal ailment that afflicted Castro -- Cuban facilities have experience dealing with.

Ah, Lucretia, Lucretia - where art thou?

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