GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- Amid the lush beauty and black, sandy beaches of the cash-strapped island of Dominica, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is providing free cooking gas to the poor, financing a coffee treatment plant and constructing an oil-storage facility.

Fewer than 160 miles south, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the self-described socialist revolutionary is providing millions of dollars' worth of equipment to construct a new international airport.

As Chávez expands his sphere of influence into the Caribbean, many of its leaders are quietly voicing discomfort, worried that it is a distraction that could undermine a decades-long effort to unite the community of 15 mostly English-speaking Caribbean nations into a single, influential economic trade bloc.