The left-wing Maradona found kinship with another global darling from Argentina, Che Guevara, whose tattoo he sported on his right arm, because “it was time the two greatest Argentines were united in the same body”. He befriended progressive leaders of Latin America who were intent on redistributing wealth in their countries, including Eva Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But it was Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who had invited Maradona to Havana to kick his cocaine habit while being tended to by the president’s personal physicians over four years at the turn of the millennium, that Maradona revered as his “second father”. Castro and Maradona would die on the same day four years apart. In My Life, Castro, whose face was tattooed on Maradona’s deadly left leg, remembered Maradona’s participation at the demonstrations against then United States president George W Bush and his country’s proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina’s Mar del Plata in 2005. At the time of the gathering, revelations had emerged in the US that the Bush administration had lied about the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before its 2003 invasion of the country. This led to heightened anti-imperialist sentiment in Latin America and around the world. At the protest, attended by Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and what Castro described as the “creme de la creme” of Latin American revolutionaries, Maradona wore a T-shirt casting Bush as a “war criminal”. “They gave an unforgettable lesson to the empire,” Castro observed, “as they defeated the FTAA on the streets.” This was vital, said Castro, because the FTAA “sought to open the borders of all the countries [in Latin America] that have a very low level of technological development to the products of those countries that have the highest level of technological development and productivity, those who build the latest-model aeroplanes, those who dominate worldwide communications, those who want to get three things from us: raw materials, cheap labour, customers and markets – a new form of ruthless, savage colonialism”.
Niren Tolsi, 'The political life of Diego Maradona', New Frame
