Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  Humberto pulled over to allow cars to pass. He was, after all, just driving. You can do that in a country where gas costs $.25 a gallon. He rolled down his window, lit a cigarette, and when all the cars had passed, he pulled out again and we were driving slowly through the night, down streets I’d never seen before.

  “There are twelve of us boys in the family. My mother is seventy-two and she still works, getting up every morning to make empanadas. Of the twelve of us, only four are worth anything. The rest don’t want to work.”

  “They’re all unemployed?” I asked.

  “No, but they do as little as possible to get by. They’re all gifted mechanics, carpenters, and so on, but they don’t want to work. They get just enough money to buy cigarettes and alcohol and they spend their time in that. And that’s my country.”

  “I know about all the problems of my country. But to go back to the way it was before the revolution? My uncle gets a pension from the government he never would have had. Of course he lied to get it, but he has one. Maybe one day when my mother is no longer able to work, she’ll get a pension, too. I don’t know.”

  We turned on Avenida las Americas and slowly drove up the hill toward home. Humberto told me how he and Betty were the only Chavistas in the neighborhood. “People tell us we should leave. But we’ve been here forty years. We built this place ourselves,” he said.

  We sat out front of Colibrí, a towering white castle in the night. The gate opened and we pulled into the patio. We went inside. Humberto told me as we walked into the house how someone came from Caracas, no doubt a Chavista party hack, to try to convince him to take charge of a proposed school for toymakers. “How many students would there be?” Humberto asked the man. “Ninety,” the man replied. Humberto shook his head. “No. No more than ten.” “Ten?” cried the man in disbelief. “Yes,” Humberto told him. “Because art can’t be mass-produced. You can’t teach ninety people how to be artists. With ten you can dedicate the time to cultivate the people and when you cultivate the people, they can go inside themselves and find their capacity to create art. Otherwise, you’re just forming people for the factory.” The man called Humberto “counter-revolutionary” and left.

  “But it was he who was the counter-revolutionary,” Humberto said, shaking his finger at me for emphasis.

  We went in and said good night, and I went in my room, closed the door and got into bed with Damian Prat’s book.

  Chapter Sixteen: The Reversed Miracle of Virtual Venezuela

  The images were startling: concrete blocks and brick walls collapsing; huge holes in tin roofs; bathrooms with urinals missing, or urinals without flush handles or simply a single semi-functional urinal fed with a hose of constantly running water coming out of the wall; huge paralyzed factories and rusting, broken-down machines; piles of industrial waste, garbage; and not a worker in sight.

  This wasn’t Detroit, but rather the facilities of Carbonorca, one of the nationalized industries of Guayana under the “Plan Socialista de Guayana” (Guayana Socialist Plan). Guayana is a region in the state of Bolívar and home of the once great Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG), otherwise known as the Basic Industries of Guayana. Guayana City, at the confluence of the rivers Caroní and the Orinoco, just over the state line from Monagas in the state of Bolívar, was once the city of the future. You can still see signs of that glorious past all over the city, even if the monuments are now chipped and faded.

  Bordering the nation of Guyana, the Guayana region is the largest of the country, and an area rich in bauxite, iron, gold, and other minerals. The regional wealth led the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez to begin the construction of a steel mill at the site of present-day Guayana City, and the plant was 20% complete when Romulo Betancourt came to power in 1960. Betancourt had a vision for the development of regional wealth, to provide all the nation’s manufactured goods consistent with the import-substitution industrialization policies that were popular at the time, so he made sure that the steel plant was operational by 1961. By 1962 the steel plant was not only providing the nation’s needs, but also exporting 80,000 metric tons of steel and cast iron.

  Through partnerships with international corporations, Betancourt was able to industrialize Guayana and provide highly-paid work for Venezuelans who flocked to the new, modern city looking for work in the industries. Through such partnerships and loans from international lending agencies like the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Betancourt was responsible for initiating the hydroelectric project at Guri with its “installed capacity of 4 million kilowatts, more than Egypt’s Aswan Dam project.”1 Partnering with Reynolds Aluminum, Betancourt oversaw the founding of the aluminum industry with the company Venalum, which would soon be providing the nation’s aluminum needs as well as exporting. To this, more industries like industrial coke, lumber, gold and the mining and refining of other exotic minerals would be gradually added.

  While the CVG and its associated projects had ups and downs, they weren’t in too bad shape when Chávez began nationalizing them in 2008. The year before nationalization, in 2007, steel producer Sidor had pumped out 4.3 million tons of their product, and other industries were also reaching their peak just as they were nationalized. But control by Chávez was the kiss of death, even though he later paraded out his “Guayana Socialist Plan,” which promised to “reactivate” the industries. In fact, the decline was precipitous and immediate and by 2012 Sidor was down to producing 1.7 million tons of steel, and to less than half of that just two years later.2

  While the drop in production and internal decay was occurring in all the nationalized industries, the collapse of CVG and the Basic Industries was emblematic of the failure of the Bolivarian dream to reintroduce import-substitution industrialization policies under the rubric of “endogenous development.” They indicated, in fact, that the Bolivarian Revolution had not only been a catastrophic failure, but a lie. Nothing except stage sets for Chávez’s television show, Alo Presidente, had been designed and created in Guayana during the years of Bolivarian rule, and even these had been left to collapse once the cameras were packed and taken back with their crews to Caracas.

  I arrived at the guesthouse run by a German expat we’ll call Carl, and his Venezuelan wife, Mireya. Carl was with the opposition and Mireya was an ardent Chavista so Carl had warned me to stay away from politics when the three of us were in the car together. Carl and Mireya met me at the modern bus station just as rain began to fall and drove me back to the guesthouse.

  I had a room with a small refrigerator and an overhead fan, no television, but fairly consistent Internet access. As it turned out, the fan was the most important equipment in the room because without it I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. Even the rain didn’t cool the air down to a comfortable level—at least not for this gringo, accustomed to the climate of the San Francisco Bay Area.

  The morning after I arrived, I decided to explore and try to find a newspaper or two. I took a bus into the center and after I bought papers and a few grocery items, I went out to look for a cab to bring me back to the posada. The taxi picked me up outside of a mall offered me a few minutes air-conditioned relief from the hot, Guayana sun. The driver listened with apparent interest to my tale of conversion from a convinced, but critical, Bolivarian, to a critical spectator. He laughed. “You were in virtual Venezuela for those years you were with the Chavistas. It’s what the government projects out to the world, the ‘Socialism of the Twenty-First Century’ while behind that virtual world is a bankrupt society, a society of consumers who don’t produce anything, but just live day to day. And a very corrupt government.” He then passionately expressed the conviction, shared by a growing majority of Venezuelans, that the presidential elections two weeks before had been stolen.

  Carl took me out the next day to visit the Basic Industries.

  The industries were on the outskirts of the city, and it seemed to me that none of the factories appeared to be open as we drove through the area.
Carl said they were still in production, although only for a few days per month. While that might have been true, there was no smoke coming out of the smokestacks of Venalum, Carbonorca, Ferrominera, or the other industrial plants; the parking lots were empty; immobile conveyor belts were rusted and so were the railroad tracks and railroad cars. The area looked, to say the least, underutilized and deteriorated.

  Before I left Mérida I’d contacted Clavel Rangel at the Correo del Caroní to see if she knew how to get in touch with Damian Prat. He hadn’t answered my emails asking for an interview nor returned my phone calls or messages. When Carl and I got back to the guesthouse I got an email from Clavel saying that Damian Prat would see me when he came into the office at four. I grabbed my camera and headed out to the street to find a cab to the Correo del Caroní.

  I arrived a few minutes before Damian. When he arrived we went into a large reception area near to do our interview.

  Damian began by addressing himself to the North American and European intellectuals who have been supporting the Bolivarian process for the past fourteen years. “Some of you in the critical, intellectual circles of Europe and the United States seem to think it’s fine that in the countries of our Latin America there are arbitrary governments and processes full of abuses that in your countries you wouldn’t consider allowing for a minute. No, in your own country you’d militantly reject the same things you seem to feel are perfectly fine to take place down here, so far way, where it’s exotic and interesting.”

  I was taken aback. Damian knew I’d been supporting the Bolivarians up until just over a month before when I’d written a sincere paean to the late President Chávez.3 And now he was right on the mark as he called me on it, and I felt it, deeply.

  He said he was a political leftist and had been since his adolescence, but he’d never believed in this government of Chávez that was run by the military. Militaries don’t make revolutions. “But of course you must know that this is no ‘revolution,’” he said. It was, in fact, a throwback to an “antiquated left, one that had been debunked long ago.” This Bolivarian process was based on what he called the “reactionary, retrograde model of Fidel Castro’s ‘revolution.’”

  He and others in the democratic Venezuelan Left had been appalled by Castro’s treatment of Heberto Padilla, what Damian called the “opportunistic” silence of Fidel before the killing of Mexican students in the Plaza of Tlatelolco in 1968. “And now, forty years later, they bring these outdated ideas to me and say this is the ‘Socialism of the Twenty-First Century’? Give me a break!” he said.

  Prat argued that the Bolivarian process was not only non-revolutionary, but retrograde, taking the country backward. He pointed to the government negligence that had resulted in the destruction of the Basic Industries of Guayana, the industries he’d followed very closely for thirty years. “If this were a revolution it would have increased production so we wouldn’t need so many imports,” he said, but the contrary has been the case. Venezuela before Chávez, he said, was “self-sufficient in aluminum; self-sufficient in iron—and, in fact, we exported both of those things. Well, now we import aluminum and iron just to cover our own needs and we’re clearly no longer exporters. That is, we’ve gone backward.”

  Venezuela, he said, is more dependent on the “empire” than ever. “For the first time in decades we now depend on the United States for our consumption of gas. How is it that a petro-state now imports more than 100,000 barrels of gasoline daily from the United States?” He said that, as Venezuelans, “we’ve never been so dependent on the United States as we are now.”

  Prat mentioned the colonial relationship of Venezuela to the US and England under the Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorship, but that now the relations were changing again, to a colonial relationship with China. Chinese engineers were mapping the country’s wealth and, according to Prat, the Bolivarian government was in the process of granting enormous mineral concessions to CITIC Corporation of China.4 In addition to mapping the mineral wealth of the country, CITIC was given blocks of the Orinoco Oil belt. He asked why a so-called anti-imperialist government would “give a foreign power control over [its] mineral wealth?”

  Damian was anxious to get to work, so I thanked him for his time and left to return to the guesthouse by cab.

  The next day Carl dropped me off at SutraCarbonorca where I had arranged an interview with Emilio Campos. Emilio Campos was Secretary General of the SutraCarbonorca union, the autonomous union of Carbonorca, the nationalized plant for refining the coke used in steel and aluminum production. Of campesino origins, Campos grew up near Yaguaraparo in the state of Sucre where he went to school. After attending the university for a time, he dropped out, like many, to take a union job in the basic industries of Guayana. There he became part of Causa R (Radical Cause), a non-doctrinaire Marxist party formed in 1971 by MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) dissenters and ex-Communist guerrillas like Alfredo Maneiro, its brilliant founder. Maneiro argued that the sterile theoretical debates of the left should be abandoned in favor of a return to the grassroots, and that meant a return to the universities to organize among students, and to the factories, which, in the case of Venezuela, meant the industrial belt of Guayana and the Basic Industries. Radical Cause didn’t do as well in the universities as it did in the factories, where its power grew among workers like Emilio.

  Emilio claims that it was largely the fight he and his compañeros engaged in against the attempted privatization of the Basic Industries under the Rafael Caldera administration, and their subsequent backing of Hugo Chávez during that struggle that brought the latter to power in 1998. Eventually Emilio’s passion, sense of justice, and commitment won him the recognition among his fellow workers that pushed him to the leadership of his union. He had just been re-elected six months before the interview, winning 80% of the vote from his fellow workers. Under Emilio the union had grown more combative, conducting numerous strikes for the long-denied contract and against a deteriorating wage that was eaten away by the nation’s growing inflation. One of the strikes lasted fifty-eight days.

  Like many union workers in the industrial belt of Guayana who had initially supported the changes Hugo Chávez brought to the country in 1998, Emilio had gone over to the opposition when he felt the Bolivarian process was “taking the country backwards.”

  “This is all a media show; that is, Venezuela is itself a big fantasy world. How can we call this socialism? Here we have capitalism disguised as socialism because they’ve stolen the socialist discourse to make it into capitalism.” But Emilio considered himself a socialist and “more a revolutionary than those running the country.” His socialism was in line with that of many others I would be interviewing over the coming days, akin to the Italian liberal socialist tradition of people like Carlo Rosselli, Norberto Bobbio, and others. “I’m a revolutionary in search of an alternative, a revolutionary for a plurality of ideas where a country seeks balance, not just for a party, or one sector of society. I believe in freedom of thought, in a diversity of ideas. But the hegemony of power makes you narrow-minded.”

  I asked Emilio about worker control and co-gestion or co-management in the Basic Industries. He thought it would be a great idea—if the proposal came from the workers. The problem was that, like everything else under Chávez, it was a top-down directive and had control as its objective. “I wouldn’t call that ‘worker control’ but ‘control of workers.’ It’s inverted.” Another problem with the so-called “worker control” was that it was set up as a way to undercut the power of independent unions. Emilio said “they set [worker-control] against unions, as a parallel element to unions. There was a clash of interests. The unions directed the interests of the workers, and the interests of the state directed worker control. And not only worker control. Co-management and ‘self-management’ were done in parallel, in competition with the unions.” Emilio said that the independent unions had been won through a great struggle and “you can’t put out that flame.” All these state-sponsored
initiatives were attempts to “sabotage the workers.”

  It was lunchtime and workers were coming in to eat meals the union was providing, and among them was an unemployed man. Emilio got up from his seat and put his arm around him. “This guy is unemployed,” he said to me, pointing at the man.

  “Ask him if he’s going to eat today. This man eats with us here and often we gather food for him to take home.” Emilio said the community kitchens and “communal houses” give food out to “those who toe the political line” of the Chavistas. And despite the “Missions,” poverty in Venezuela was still a problem. “I’d like you to visit the barrios around here and see how the people live; how they go around in the markets picking up garbage to survive; how our indigenous people live, begging for change at the stop lights so they can buy what they need because there’s no flour, there’s no rice, there’s no spaghetti, there’s nothing. Why? [Because the Chavistas] have progressively destroyed the entire productive apparatus of the country, all the productive initiatives for the development of the country. And why is that? To control everything. To tell you ‘this is the piece of meat you’re going to eat today, this is your portion of rice for today.’ Cuban style,” Emilio said.

  The last comments rankled me. I no longer held Cuba as a model of anything but resistance to US impositions, but I came from a culture of the left that, even so, refused to criticize the island, primarily because many of us still considered the embargo and other US policies toward Cuba to be criminal, petty and mean-spirited. Only when I considered the problem from a Venezuelan oppositionist’s point of view, could I begin to understand the perspective underlying the rancor. It’s worth considering that here to put Emilio’s comments in context.