HAVANA (AP) – The Bush administration may consider Hugo Chavez to be a budding Adolf Hitler, but the Venezuelan president was being celebrated yesterday in Cuba as an anti-imperialist worthy of the highest honours – even a United Nations prize named for Cuba’s independence hero Jose Marti.

Chavez was visiting Havana amid an intensifying propaganda war between Washington and Latin America’s leftist leaders. US Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld compared Chavez to Hitler on Thursday, and warned darkly about populist leadership in Bolivia and Cuba. Venezuela’s vice-president fired back yesterday by comparing the Bush administration to the Third Reich.

Fidel Castro’s government said 200,000 Cubans would crowd Revolution Plaza for last night’s ceremony to grant Chavez UNESCO’s 2005 International Prize Jose Marti. The forum was expected to give Chavez and Castro a chance to pat each other on the back and promote regional solidarity while bashing the US government.

Marti has been glorified in Cuba as the ultimate anti-imperialist, a label both Chavez and Castro have embraced for themselves in their struggles with the United States.

Thousands of young Venezuelans, Bolivians and other Latin Americans studying medicine for free in Cuba will attend the ceremony, the island’s state-run media reported.

Far from regional heroes, the US government considers Chavez and Castro to be populists who threaten individual rights.

Rumsfeld expressed the same fears about Bolivia’s new leftist president, Evo Morales, during a National Press Club appearance Thursday. “We’ve seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome.”

“I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money. He’s a person who was elected legally – just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally – and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr Morales and others,” said Rumsfeld.

Venezuelan vice-president Jose Vicente Rangel hit back yesterday, calling US President George W Bush “the North American Hitler”.

Rangel compared Bush’s administration to that of the Third Reich, accusing vice-president Dick Cheney of “trafficking in war” and calling Rumsfeld a “delinquent” and an “arms dealer”.

“The unacceptable comparison of President Chavez with Hitler is a concrete indication of the desperation that reigns at this moment in the governing circles of Washington,” said Rangel.

Chavez himself didn’t appear to mention Rumsfeld’s comments upon arrival in Cuba early yesterday, when he was received at the Havana airport by Castro. Front-page photographs in the island’s newspapers showed the two with broad grins. Chavez told Cuban reporters, “A kiss for Cuba, which I love.”

International media on the island were not invited to the pre-dawn encounter.

Before the evening award’s ceremony, Chavez planned to inaugurate an international book fair dedicated to Venezuela, and many speculated he would swing by the open-air Anti-Imperialist Plaza, where the Cuban government launched a mysterious building project directly in front of the US diplomatic mission in Havana.

The project, which included dozens of tall flag poles, appears to be an attempt to block a gigantic electric sign put up by American officials in January with streaming text of sayings about freedom and excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Marti prize was created by UNESCO in 1994 on the initiative of Cuba to recognise an individual or institution contributing to the unity and integration of countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Earlier recipients of the US$5,000 prize (euro4,160) include Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez Casanova and Ecuadorean painter Oswaldo Guayasamin.