My lover, the great dictator

"It's friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship.
When other friendships have been forgot, ours will still be hot." Hugo and his pal Fidel show off for the gals.


By Aussiegirl

Well, you know, a mistress is likely to know all your secrets and reveal all your faults when the affair is over.

My lover, the great dictator - Newspaper Edition - Times Online

My lover, the great dictator
The ex-mistress of Venezuela’s leader, darling of Britain’s left, predicts an autocratic disaster, reports Tony Allen-Mills

THERE are many reasons why Herma Marksman still looks back fondly on the 10 years she spent as the mistress of Hugo Chavez, who at the time was an ambitious lieutenant-colonel on his way to becoming the president of Venezuela.
“I keep the best memories of him close to me,” Marksman said last week. “He’s the kind of man that showers you with flowers and chocolates, serenades you with romantic songs and never forgets your birthday. People say he is a violent man, but he never raised a hand or his voice to me.”

Yet Marksman’s tone changed when she talked about his role as the leader of the so-called Bolivarian revolution — the populist Latin American phenomenon that has turned Chavez into a global icon of anti-American agitation.

For almost a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, Marksman encouraged her military lover as he used her home to plot a coup against Venezuela’s decadent civilian government. The couple shared a dream, she said, of “a prosperous Venezuela where justice would reign”.

That dream, for her at least, is shattered. “Now you can’t trust him,” she went on bitterly in her first interview with any foreign media. “He is imposing a fascist dictatorship. A totalitarian regime is coming because he doesn’t believe in democratic institutions. Hugo controls all the powers.”