Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez shouts greetings to the press upon his arrival in. AFP PHOTO/JUAN BARRETO

"The Empire is in decline... As Mao Tse Tung said, it is a paper tiger," Venezuela's staunchly anti-US President Hugo Chavez quipped as he arrived in Havana, using his and Cuba's usual term for the United States.

Smiling and greeting wellwishers, Chavez, an elected leftist-populist, said he was headed straight to see his ailing friend and political mentor Fidel Castro, 80. Cuba is the Americas' only one-party communist regime, led for almost five decades by Castro, who temporarily ceded power to his brother Raul after undergoing surgery in July.

"We have come here to get balance back in the world," Chavez insisted.

Chavez, who is lobbying for a seat on the UN Security Council which Venezuela has said it now has the votes to secure, alleged that Washington was trying to undermine his trip to UN headquarters in New York next week.

"They have denied visas to my security people, they have denied a visa to my doctor ... I am going to go even if I have to go all by myself," Chavez pledged.Wednesday Cuba slammed US foreign policy and its "hegemonic" heft.

"They would impose a genuine worldwide dictatorship through war and economic power," charged Carlos Lage, vice president of communist Cuba's Council of State, in a heated speech to NAM delegates.

"The end of the Cold War was not the beginning of the peace that many dreamed of," Lage said lashing out at the US role as global policeman.

"The real story has been growing domination by one nation that unscrupulously applies economic and political pressure, and believes it has the right to invade any country to achieve its objectives," he said.

Just after the United States marked the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terror strikes, Lage also seemed to lay some blame at Washington's doorstep.

He argued: "terrorism is a consequence of injustice, lack of education and culture, and of poverty ... and hegemonic power. It is not the consequence of radical ideologies that should be swept away by bombs and missiles."

On Tuesday, Chavez -- who in the past has accused the US government of trying to oust and to kill him -- said "the hypothesis that is gaining strength is that it was the US imperial power itself that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist deed against its own people and against citizens of the entire world."

"What for? To justify its aggressions that promptly ensued against Afghanistan, Iraq and the threats against all of us, against Venezuela," Chavez in an address carried live on Venezuelan state television.

"The towers fell in nine seconds, so the hypothesis that the towers were blown up, that there were groups of explosives, is not so outlandish," Chavez told a group of women supporters.

The events gave "the excuse to the US empire to lash out with more wrath and fury against the world, to bomb cities to threaten the entire world," Chavez charged in remarks unlikely to ease tensions between the two countries.

Chavez's Venezuela is Cuba's most important political and economic ally. Its oil shipments to Cuba at preferential credit rates have been key to keeping Cuba's battered economy afloat in the wake of the collapse of the former East bloc.

Chavez has imported Cuban literacy programs and health care workers, as has Bolivia's President Evo Morales, who arrived in Havana Thursday and calls Castro a beloved "grandfather."

Morales, on a visit to Guatemala Tuesday, charged "there is a plot, an aggression against our movement, against our government" by the United States. He said Washington was bent on "making (Bolivia's socialist) policies for change fail."

In a draft final document the NAM summit voices concern at new US action aimed at affecting the stability of Venezuela, including establishment of an office to increase spying on Venezuela and Cuba.