FEATURE-Flagship health project stirs Venezuelan politics
* Network of clinics gives free healthcare to poor
* Government, opposition seek political gain from project
* Chavez still popular, but faces fight at 2010 vote
CARACAS, Oct 27 (Reuters) - Posters of Fidel Castro, Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Hugo Chavez adorn the inside of a small circular building where Cuban and Venezuelan doctors attend a steady trickle of patients in a poor neighborhood.
"I don't care what you call this -- socialism, charity, whatever you like -- but it works for me!" said a smiling Jose Fuentes, removing an oxygen mask after a weekly session at one of the free 'Barrio Adentro' (Inside the Neighborhood) clinics in the Venezuelan capital.
For supporters, President Hugo Chavez's flagship social project, with around 15,000 mainly Cuban doctors in more than 6,000 clinics, illustrates the best of his decade-long rule: a commitment to the poor and tangible results.
Critics, however, say 'Barrio Adentro' is a political project illustrating the dangerous "Cubanization" of Venezuela. Half of the two-storey, red-brick clinics are collapsing, local doctors have been pushed out of jobs by Cubans, and traditional hospitals are underfunded, they argue.
With National Assembly elections looming for late 2010, both the government and the opposition have latched onto Barrio Adentro in recent weeks as a totemic issue to try and sway voters.
Barely a week goes by without Chavez appearing several times beside doctors at meetings, or inside medical installations, to promote the project's "re-launch".
Pro-opposition newspapers, on the other hand, have been running a series of photos of rundown and empty clinics, giving an impression of government neglect.
"Just as Barrio Adentro helped him win some elections in the past, so it might help him lose them now," Jorge Diaz Polanco, a medical expert at Venezuela's Central University, told one of those newspapers, El Nacional.
At half a dozen clinics visited by Reuters in the sprawling "January 23rd" district of Caracas this week, there were few complaints about Barrio Adentro, or Chavez, from medical staff, patients and local residents.
CHAVEZ' "SOFT SPOTS"
Further afield, though, the picture is not so unanimous.
While Chavez maintains a popularity rating of around 50 percent, Venezuelans grumble more and more about chronic crime, runaway inflation, unemployment, and -- the newest problem -- electricity and water cuts. Continued...
