Official: Hugo Chavez has cancer

So the galactic caudillo, the liberator of the world's disenfranchised, and sponsor of Frank Williams Formula 1 team, spoke. From communist and totalitarian Cuba. And confirmed what Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda announced a few days ago: it is cancer. What type? We do not know. However, Bocaranda said that it was prostate cancer. When will Hugo Chavez reassume his duties, as President of Venezuela, in Venezuela, as the constitution mandates? We do not know. What kind of contingency / succession plan will be rolled out, given that Chavez has cancer? We do not know, though Chavez did say that he continues "al mando", that is, "in control", of his regime, from Cuba, where he is nothing but a puppet under the Castros' boot.

I refuse to join the hypocritical chorus of well wishers. The spectacle of the last few days, where all chavista officials went even as far as to deny that Chavez was sick, was, quite simply, nauseating. The opposition did not do any better: from their collective calls for a prompt recuperation, to their acceptance of being ruled from Cuba, the Venezuelan political spectrum, in its entirety, has to be one of the most pusillanimous, undeserving, dishonourable, amoral, debased, traitorous, sordid, and unethical of Venezuela's republican history. There's no two ways about this. And just to be frontal: I wish Chavez a long, painful, irreversible, and humiliating disease. Now that prostate cancer has been identified as the likely one, perhaps Chavez can fulfil his lifetime ambition of becoming Mrs Fidel Castro. For no individual that has harmed so many, for so long, without reason, other than political, can expect sympathy at this hour. Not from me at least. It's called action and reaction, it's called what goes around comes around.

Time to buy copious quantities of pop corn, and watch in awe the Reservoir Dogs-style finale that will ensue among chavistas and other criminal gangs in Venezuela, vying for power and riches.