Weekly Report - 07 July 2011 (WR-11-27)

"A Bolívar for our times"; "a Latin American liberator". This extravagant praise in Cuba's communist mouthpiece Granma was the send off from Havana for Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez as he returned to Caracas on 4 July. It sounded eerily like an elegiac obituary. Chávez appeared on the balcony of the Miraflores palace in time for his country's bicentennial celebrations, but great uncertainty continues to surround the state of his health after he broke his 18-day silence on 30 June by revealing that he had been diagnosed with cancer and had been operated on for a cancerous tumour.