Baba Booey Hugo

Poor Hugo Chavez, reeling from a month-long general strike and the steady desertion of allies, thought pal Fidel Castro was calling to cheer him up the other day. Sadly, Chavez appears to have been pranked by wacky DJs using taped snippets of Castro conversation:

The tape appears to have Chavez, who is struggling to end a month-old national strike by opponents, happily answering what he thought would be a friendly call Monday morning from Castro, one of his closest allies.

But on the other end of the line were WXDJ-FM disc jockeys Joe Ferrero and Enrique Santos, who ended the conversation by calling Chavez "terrorist" and "animal," along with a few expletives.

Supposedly Santos and Ferrero's boss is upset about the prank, but it turns out Chavez is quite a practical joker himself—even if you don't count sending the hemisphere's most oil-rich country into a depression as a world-class gag:

For the past Day of the Innocents, Latin Americans' version of April Fool's Day that is celebrated Dec. 28, he announced on the radio that he was tired and going to resign. He then changed his tone. ''Ha ha! You fell for it!'' he laughed.