Hugo Chavez Dreamt Of Playing In Yankee Stadium

Hugo Chavez has died. Long before he entertained ambitions to be leader of Venezuela, Chavez was just another baseball fan who wanted to play for the New York Yankees.

“It was my dream,” Chavez told CNN in 2009. “I would have preferred, personally, to do that. However, things do not decide what they are going to do. … I became a soldier, then Venezuela just shattered — but I am still the young baseball player who wanted to play in the Yankee Stadium.”

Amazingly, his baseball-playing socialist cohort in the photo above is alive and well at 86.