Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  In preparation for my trip to Venezuela I searched online and found some interesting links by which I got in touch with Franz Lee and Jutta Schmitt in Mérida, the capital of the state of the same name, tucked away in a valley of the Venezuelan Andes. They responded and invited me to visit them and I began making plans to spend Christmas break in Venezuela.

  I caught a post-Christmas flight and arrived in time for the New Year’s Eve fireworks over Caracas. The next day I took my video camera and went to Plaza Bolívar to do interviews. I found I had a knack for “cold call” interviews (likely a gift from growing up in the military), and by early afternoon I had filled three or so tapes. I remember in particular one interview with a revolutionary musician named Juan who entertained the New Year’s Day crowd lazing on the benches in the warm sun with covers of songs by Ali Primera, the nation’s revolutionary hero of the New Song movement. I asked him what the Bolivarian Revolution meant to him. At the time I was still having trouble pronouncing the term “Bolivarian” in Spanish, but he was happy to educate this gringo tourist. “Look, this isn’t a revolution. It’s a reform and it’s a positive process, but we need to push it further.”

  This would be the beginning of a long discussion that I would have with Venezuelans for the next eight or so years. How deep was this “reform” and what distinguishes a “reform” from a “revolution”? How do you know when you’re in one and not the other? And what difference does it make? The fact that Chávez had finally come to power as a result of elections further confused the question since “revolutions” throughout the twentieth century had been defined as armed struggles under the direction of vanguards that resulted in a “clearing of the table” with entirely new governments, bureaucracies and political classes.

  My trip to Venezuela took place in a particularly bleak historical context. George W. Bush had lied to justify the invasion of Iraq. Like many, I was still outraged that George W. Bush had managed to steal both his first election and then his reelection without any mass expression of outrage.4 I was horrified by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, particularly by the brutal attack on, and destruction of, Fallujah.

  It was, then, a delight to be in Venezuela where a sense of hope pervaded the already optimistic tropical ambience. During the oil bonanza that resulted from Bush taking Iraq out of production with a war, Chávez went on a massive spending spree, financing a number of social welfare programs that he called “the Missions.” This was welcome news to those of us who had seen programs for the poor and marginal cut to the bone or dropped completely as part of the neoliberal program beginning with Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. Now, after decades of neoliberal fundamentalism, and nearly fifteen years since the collapse of socialism, a left alternative appeared to be developing in Latin America, and in particular under President Chávez.

  The former Lieutenant Colonel who won the presidency in 1998 had a “revolutionary” proposal for Venezuela. The first step was to draft a new constitution that, in the process, coincidentally increased executive power, eliminated one house of the parliament to make it a unicameral body and, through artful gerrymandering, gave his coalition majority power even with a minority of the votes.

  At the same time that there were disturbing trends toward recentralizing power under Chávez—after a decade or more of decentralization in the wake of the 1989 “Caracazo” riots or “rebellion”—there were other trends that pointed the opposite direction. Chávez included, both in the new Constitution (which renamed Venezuela the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”) and in official rhetoric, a proposal for “protagonistic participatory democracy” to replace the representative democracy that many admitted was in crisis by the time Chávez came to power. Social movement activists and revolutionary figures emerged to celebrate the project of the “Bolivarian Revolution” and they were joined by massive numbers of people from the underclass who had never participated in the political system before. These contradictions, among many others, encouraged cautious optimism from many in Venezuela and the world that something new might be happening to challenge the neoliberal “TINA” pronounced by Margaret Thatcher years before: “There Is No Alternative.”

  Many who had struggled, sweated, and exhausted themselves for years to make a better Venezuela suddenly found their dreams, visions, and projects funded by the flood of oil money into state coffers and handed out by Chávez. The Bolivarian bandwagon passed through the country like a mythic caravan drawn by unicorns that left trails of money and promises of more magic to come in its tracks. Who could resist this dazzling spectacle in a world that was otherwise left out in the cold by the austere policies of neoliberal orthodoxy?

  Then there was Chávez himself, a one-of-a-kind charismatic political outsider with a big “llanero” (plainsman) personality that many, especially the poor, believed could fix the problems facing the country. He hypnotized the world at the UN when he took the podium and denounced as “satanic” the presence of George W. Bush. Chávez inspired Latin Americans and anti-imperialists the world over when he proclaimed Bolivarian Unity against imperialist free-trade initiatives with projects like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA), Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), Bank of the South, Telesur (a Bolivarian response to CNN) and others.

  Were there contradictions? Yes, many. The biggest one was that this was all being funded by high oil prices and led by a military man, a former Lieutenant Colonel whose democratic credentials left something to be desired: he’d participated in a coup attempt against the Carlos Andres Pérez (CAP) government in February 1992. For that crime he’d served a light sentence and had been pardoned by CAP’s successor, Rafael Caldera. At a time when all of Latin America was recovering, at last, from military juntas and olive-green presidencies, Chávez’s government seemed a step backwards, especially considering the number of posts he began to give to military, or former military. But the promises he held out for deeper democracy and greater social justice also seemed to be cause for cautious optimism.

  Perhaps I wanted to believe too much that I was seeing a revolutionary process, the “Pretty Revolution” that people were talking about. Given the reality I’d just left behind, of a country engaged in an illegal war declared by an illegitimate president, and given the absence of powerful and sustained resistance to executive criminality in the US, I was no doubt desperate to believe something, anything, that appeared hopeful. Yes, there were questions and “disconfirming data,” but it has also been established that “when faced with disconfirming data, instead of relinquishing their theories, people continue to maintain them by modifying them to take account of the disconfirming results.”5 Now, over a decade later, I can see that’s what I did: I followed my intuitions and began to assimilate the “confirming data.” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  My first impressions of Venezuela from walking around Plaza Bolívar in Caracas and talking to average people, most of whom were poor, was that the country had at last been blessed with a president who took the majority and its needs into account. The woman selling drinks out of a pushcart on the street by the church; the man selling balloons in the park; the man on the bench watching his daughter play around the statue of the Simon Bolívar mounted on his steed; the street vendors painting light poles and cleaning plazas; the popular initiatives of community gardens, community centers, and other hopeful projects confirmed the narrative they all offered in one version or another: this president was following in the footsteps of the Liberator (as Simon Bolívar is known) and Jesus, with his concern for the poor.

  Certainly, if nothing else, Chávez had awakened dreams among the people of Venezuela. The question on everyone’s mind was, what impact would these dreams have on the stark reality of the country with its dramatic inequality of wealth, high levels of unemployment, and rising levels of violence? Would there be more reforms, or would there, indeed, be a revolution?

  I went on to Mérida by bus and stayed in a guesthouse
a few blocks from Plaza Bolívar. Franz Lee and Jutta Schmidt and I met in a place called Café Magnolia, also known as “Café de los Churros” for its fried donuts. We found an immediate connection in Ernst Bloch and spent a long time talking and drinking one café marrón (Venezuelan cappuccinos) after another.

  Lee was a nearly-blind, light-skinned black South African who had gotten his PhD under Bloch at the University of Tubingen. He’d moved to Guyana where he knew Walter Rodney, and then to Venezuela where he’d gone to work teaching political science at the University of the Andes in Mérida. Jutta was some twenty years younger than Franz and had been his student when he taught in Germany and eventually they married. Jutta was and is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, and together they made a formidable team in the classroom as well as in their writings. Through Franz and Jutta I got to know Juan Veroes, an Afro-Venezuelan Chavista who became a close friend and introduced me to the Chavista Left in Mérida.

  I was amazed by the many projects that the oil revenue was making possible, such as the educational missions that included the Bolivarian Universities, and various levels of adult education. Barrio Adentro, or “Inside the Neighborhood” was a program of clinics located around the country and staffed by Cuban doctors. There were community kitchens and cafeterias where for about $1 US you could get a nutritious, multi-course meal. Job training programs such as Vuelvan Caras subsidized people as they studied and then offered them small loans to start their own cooperative business. Out of this program came an explosion of cooperatives around the country, the number rising from under a thousand when Chávez came to power, to an estimated 150,000 or more by 2006.

  The cooperatives, as I understood it at the time, were to be the foundation of “Twenty-First Century Socialism” (TFCS) that was going to be the socialism of protagonistic and participatory democracy. The cooperatives would be the training ground for the new society. As Chávez put it at the time, if people could run their own business, they could eventually run the country!

  In addition to job training, loans, and credits to the cooperatives, they were also given preference for government contracts. Cooperative cafes began making lunches and delivering them to government ministries on contract. Agricultural cooperatives were given expropriated land to grow on. Media collectives received funding to provide programming for government television stations.

  Of course, it all came at a price, and that price was autonomy and independence, because, naturally, the government appeared to be funding only those grassroots projects that supported the government, though at the time this seemed to be unproblematic since the government was, after all, funding grassroots projects.

  In addition to the local grassroots projects emerging within the country, Chávez began organizing international initiatives, particularly in Latin America. ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) was to be a counterproposal to the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement and it would function as a mechanism to unite the countries of the region. The Sucre would be a common currency and there would be the Banco Del Sur, the Southern Bank, for low-interest loans to poor countries, and Petrocaribe to sell oil on easy terms to poor countries in Latin America.

  All these programs brought Chávez into the limelight, where he clearly loved to be. My skepticism evaporated as I watched the llanero on Alo Presidente (“Hello President,” his weekly variety-show that he emceed), promoting his programs, criticizing his ministers for falling behind in their duties, talking to ordinary people who called in, interviewing guests, regaling them with his stories, offering political reflections and tidbits of historical knowledge—and singing! Chávez, more than a politician or a president, quickly became a very sympathetic television personality and soon even his weekly program wasn’t enough for him. His cadenas, or obligatory transmissions, became regular interruptions of all media, and there he would be, inaugurating a new industrial plant or visiting a cooperative farming experiment or núcleos de desarrollo endógenos or NDEs.

  NDEs was a strategy to develop and integrate Venezuela’s productive processes. I remember Angel Palacios, a filmmaker at Panafilms in Caracas, explaining it all to me one afternoon.

  “The idea is you have a region suitable for growing corn. So right there near the cornfields you install a granary. Next to the granary you have a mill, and then you set up a place right there to make cachapas (Venezuelan cornmeal pancakes). The whole economic enterprise is a circle, all integrated and united in the productive process.” I listened and watched as he drew each little enterprise on the back of an envelope, and I marveled at the beauty of it. Eventually, NDEs became NUDES, Núcleos de desarrollo endógenos socialistas, but they maintained the same elegant theoretical beauty through the transition.

  I never actually saw a NDE or NUDES in action. The yucca processing plant that I first visited in 2006 on the southeast side of Lake Maracaibo wasn’t yet in production. I was told that the plant was almost ready and would begin to process yucca for the agricultural cooperative “any time now.” When I returned the following year, still not a gear in the huge plant was moving, and, in fact, the gears and everything else, showed signs of rust. A friend familiar with the project tells me that now, nearly nine years later, the gears still haven’t yet moved a single tooth.

  Certainly there must be a NUDES somewhere in Venezuela that function, if nothing more than because the government needs something to showcase. But I can neither confirm nor deny that. I can only affirm that the NUDES remain, in my mind and in the minds of many Venezuelans, an elegant theory.

  Chapter Ten: Cracks in the Facade

  So I returned home to spend a semester teaching at Vista Community College in Berkeley but I was so inspired by the possibilities of Chávez’s plans that I prepared to leave in the summer to spend a year in Venezuela. Over the spring of 2005 I followed news of developments in Venezuela through online sources and I eventually began to write for a few of them.1

  When I returned to Venezuela in early June 2005 I was welcomed with open arms by people I’d met earlier in the Andean city of Mérida. I told Juan Veroes that I needed a place to live and he suggested I meet a couple of people he knew. Betty Osorio and her husband Humberto Rivas had built a children’s theater named Teatro Colibrí (Hummingbird Theater) not too far from the city center. They were both puppeteers, and had traveled all over Latin America doing shows for children when they were younger. Betty had gone on to get her doctorate in early childhood education and now taught next door at the University of the Andes (ULA). Humberto had his workshop in the same complex where they lived and there he made beautiful puppets and wooden children’s toys. Their son was by then gone from home, but their daughter Xica lived in another space downstairs and was finishing up her law degree.

  On the bottom floor was a large patio area, part of it bricked, and another part had fruit trees and one banana plant, now heavy with green fruit. There was a two story apartment next to Humberto’s toy shop, and then along one side was Xica’s apartment, and then along another side was the three-story theater itself. Above Xica’s apartment was a vacant studio, which was for rent, and on the top floor, the fourth, was a tango and dance studio where the tango teacher, Nelson, also lived.

  Betty showed us around and offered to rent me the studio, which I immediately accepted. I began moving in right away: I swept up and cleaned and soon had a simple but beautiful place to call home in Mérida, in addition to a lovely family of creative, revolutionary people, who really made me feel like part of their family.

  Humberto was a musician, in addition to making his living as toymaker, with a big heart and a happy disposition. He always had a joke or two to tell, and every encounter began with a big hug. Betty was cerebral and a big talker. Indeed, it was hard to find ways into her monologues that often ranged from simple stories from her travels, to the theories of Habermas and Simon Bolívar and long, complex expositions on hermeneutics and ethics in the r
evolutionary process.

  The studio had one window looking out on Pico Bolívar, the highest mountain in Venezuela. The mountain range ran down from each side of the peak and disappeared into the horizon. It was June, and the “tardes de San Juan” (Saint John afternoons) were spectacular: the low clouds coming in from the south caught on the peaks, then slowly rolled down the slopes until they disappeared into the valley.

  Thanks to José Sant Roz, a well-known and connected writer from Mérida I’d met on my first trip to Venezuela, I was invited to participate in the World Poetry Festival of Venezuela. I spent a week doing readings in various parts of the country, for which I was paid the equivalent of nearly five hundred dollars. I was exhausted at the end, and I felt I’d earned my money. It was, incidentally, the only money I ever received from the Bolivarian government. All other expenses from my stay in Venezuela, my movie and my other solidarity work came out of my own savings and a few hundred dollars of donations from friends.2

  I returned to Mérida and soon was moving through the Mérideña Chavista Left (the Mérida Left) as if I belonged there. A poet I’d gotten to know by his pseudonym, Poeta Simon Arado, introduced me to the community kitchen known as “The People’s Café,” which served up a good, multi-course lunch for the equivalent of one US dollar and that’s where I met Malacara (Ugly), the Tupamaro.

  The only space available in the cafe that day was right next to a table full of Tupamaros, the radical left group who took their name from the 1960s Uruguayan guerrillas, who, in turn, took their name from the last Incan ruler, Túpac Amaru. The Venezuelan Tupamaros made their reputation as armed revolutionaries who were the backbone of left resistance to social democratic governments of the Democratic Action. They’d had an uneasy alliance with the Chávez government that flared up into small conflicts at times, but generally they were allied with the Bolivarian process and saw themselves as its armed defenders.