Two-way trade rose from $461 million in 1999 to $912 million in 2000, and reached $541 million in the first half of this year, reported Lomas, who headed a Cuban delegation to a bilateral cooperation meeting in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, in early September.

Under the year-old agreement, Venezuela has been supplying Cuba with up to 53,000 barrels of oil a day on favorable terms. Havana pays for part of the oil in cash and up to one-quarter of it under preferential financing terms allowing 15 years to pay and a 2 percent interest rate. The deal, similar to pacts Venezuela has signed with Central American nations, replaced part of the more than 100,000 barrels a day that Cuba previously had to purchase on the open market.

At the bilateral meeting on September 5, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez hailed the accord and said the two countries' trade cooperation offered an alternative to the "neoliberal" economic integration proposal he said was being imposed on Latin America through the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which he described as the "cauldron of hell itself."

"I think Cuba is lucky that it's not being called" to join the FTAA, the Venezuelan president said. Revolutionary Cuba is excluded from the FTAA talks. Chávez has said his government will call a referendum on whether Venezuela should join the U.S.-dominated trade pact.

Venezuela, the third-biggest supplier of oil to the U.S. market, has sought to maintain its substantial trade relations with the United States, while establishing a certain distance from U.S. foreign policy.

The same week as its trade talks with Cuba, the Venezuelan government said it considered a 1961 military alliance with Washington to have expired and would not renew it, calling the agreement "a Cold War museum piece." After meeting with U.S. ambassador Donna Hrinak, Venezuelan foreign minister José Vicente Rangel said the U.S. military mission would be departing shortly.

Chávez is currently on a three-week tour of Europe and the Mideast to promote cooperation by oil-producing countries in an effort to support oil prices, which have fallen sharply this year because of the declining world capitalist economy. In Tehran, Chávez announced that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, the three largest producers inside OPEC, had agreed to a strategy to bolster oil prices, down 25 percent since the U.S.-led war drive began September 11.

Chávez's government has strongly defended its right to establish closer relations with several governments that have been labeled as "terrorist" by Washington, from Cuba to Iran, Iraq, and Libya.

"We're not against anything or anyone," Chávez said. "We're defending Venezuela's interests."

While Chávez has condemned the September 11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as acts of "terrorism and irrationality," he has distanced himself from the U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan. "No one has the global right to be attacking and making lists of terrorists according to his own view," he said October 18.
 
 
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