Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  Many Venezuelans feel that from the day he took power Fidel had attempted to gain influence over, and access to, Venezuela’s oil wealth. Within days of his victory over Batista, Fidel had gone off to visit Venezuela’s newly elected President, Romulo Betancourt, who had come to power after Venezuela’s Democratic Revolution of 1958. Despite the fact that there was only a year separating the Cuban and the Venezuelan revolutions, there was an enormous political gulf between the two leaders from the beginning.

  Betancourt was a committed social democrat. Indeed, he became best known for his “Betancourt Doctrine” that guided Venezuela’s foreign policy of not recognizing any government of either the Right or the Left that had not come to power democratically. Betancourt had been a communist in his youth, and later co-founder of the Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) party. AD was “a leftist-revolutionary, nationalist, populist, multiclass, anti-imperialist party” in its early incarnation, and Betancourt had moved it toward an ever-deepening commitment to democratic ideas in the struggle to overthrow the dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jimenez.5 After the dictator fled in January 1958, several political parties, spanning the political spectrum, met at Punto Fijo, not the city, but rather the house of Rafael Caldera (of the COPEI) in Caracas.6 There they signed the Pact of Punto Fijo, which committed the three parties in attendance to democratic procedures in government. The elections in 1958 drew out over 92% of the population to elect Betancourt with 49.2% of the vote.7 Most notably, the far left Communist Party won 3.23% of the vote, the center left to the far right won 16.20% of the vote and the constitutional left won an amazing 80.55% of the vote.8 Betancourt served his one complete term as president and left office, consistent with his commitment to democracy and to its corollary of alternation in power.

  By contrast with Betancourt, Fidel had no commitment to liberal democracy or alternation in power, as he made clear over his nearly fifty years in power. It seems likely that Betancourt already knew what Carlos Franqui eventually discovered, that Fidel believed “all criticism is opposition. All opposition is counterrevolutionary” and that he “always thought of himself as the revolution.”9 Although little is known of the five hour meeting between the Cuban and Venezuelan presidents on January 25, 1959 in which Fidel hoped to gain preferential access to Venezuelan oil, it’s likely that Betancourt recognized that Fidel intended to rule the country as a caudillo, much in the tradition of Batista who he’d overthrown—and he wasn’t mistaken.10 In any case, it quickly became clear to the two leaders that they were on different trajectories. We know that Fidel revealed his plans to nationalize US and Cuban industries, and it’s also likely that Betancourt saw this as taking the heat of the US off of Venezuela (and himself, given his past leadership role in the Costa Rican Communist Party), allowing him to chart a relatively independent course in the hemisphere under the hegemony of the US while Cuba would be forced to ally more closely with the Soviet Union. 11

  Betancourt nearly paid for his commitment to democracy with his life. The right-wing Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was behind one assassination attempt, but the right wing wasn’t the only political sector antagonized by Betancourt’s AD, that “sought to carry out the programs of social democracy.”12 But Betancourt’s coalition didn’t include the Venezuelan Communist Party, and that caused deep resentments on the far left and would have powerful ramifications for the country in the future. Also feeling snubbed by the Betancourt government, by 1963 Fidel Castro began training and leading communist guerrillas to undertake a military campaign against the young Venezuelan democracy.13 And so the first democratically-elected president of Venezuela who was allowed to serve a full term was a target of dictators of both the Right and the Left.

  The communist insurgency was defeated and Fidel was isolated and had to wait forty years for another chance to get his hands on Venezuelan oil. But when his opportunity finally arrived, Hugo Chávez made sure Fidel got as much of the black gold as he felt he needed. At first the trade was fairly simple: oil for doctors who were sent to attend to poor people in the slums of the country. Few objected to that, although many right wing Venezuelans did find it objectionable. But after the coup attempt in 2002 Fidel convinced Chávez to turn over the direction of Venezuelan intelligence to Cubans, which his younger protégé did. At every point Venezuela paid more oil, and this didn’t happen without Venezuelans taking note.

  Venezuelans are a very patriotic people: you’ll find a Plaza Bolívar in every village, town and city of the country and a bust or statue of the “Liberator.” The fact that Cuban intelligence began pulling the strings in the country,14 and that Chávez increasingly was moving toward a more authoritarian, and less democratic, model of socialism was very disturbing to many Venezuelans. Gradually, Cubans began to be seen in other branches of government, including the military, and in advisory roles everywhere. As the economy went south, many people blamed the Cuban influence, and with some justification: the long lines for scarce consumer goods in Venezuela had never been seen before, but they looked an awful lot like Cuba, with its failed socialist model. Before every crisis Chávez began meeting with his “grey eminence,” and Maduro has carried on that tradition, flying to Cuba soon after his election to consult with what many view as his “superiors.” All this added up to what many viewed as the complete subordination of Venezuela to a revolution without even democratic pretensions that clashed with the democratic and nationalist sensibilities of many Venezuelans, like Emilio. As Rory Carroll wrote of a Venezuelan named Andres who had been displaced in his job in the intelligence services by Cubans, “Like many Venezuelan leftists, [Andres] considered Fidel an anachronism, a cautionary tale of revolutionary idealism warping into totalitarian control and central-planning fiasco.”15 This view could would no doubt have gotten an “amen” from Emilio.

  “I respected the greatness of Cuba, but more the greatness of the Cuban people, for their resistance, not those who rule over them and have brought them where they are today,” Emilio told me. “That’s not the socialism I believe in, that authoritarian model imposed on the people.”

  Emilio was first and foremost a worker, and that meant that he believed in work, and the dignity it brought people. The struggle to maintain that dignity of workers, despite a government that had refused for years to even discuss a collective contract in the Basic Industries, was what kept Emilio going. What he said next was prophetic, considering what happened to the country a year or so later.

  “The idea that people don’t need to work to eat, is dangerous. If the oil runs out or the prices of oil drop, how are you going to sustain the people who don’t produce, if they don’t go out into the fields and work? This could be a boomerang and come back on you and you’ll have no response when the people who won’t work keep coming back to ask for their money.”

  The government policy of “giveaways” was bizarre. At a time when the industries across the board were functioning at a quarter or a third of their capacity, the industries were increasing their workforce.

  “When I came here, there were 450 workers [at Carbonorca]. Today we have 800,” Emilio said. I knew that Carbonorca was at the time producing at about one quarter of its capacity. “Yes,” he said, noting the shock on my face, “the state keeps adding more employees, without producing anything, and this is how they inflate the employment figures.” He went through the different industries: Sidor had 10,000, now increased to 18,000, working at less than half of its capacity; Bauxilum had 1,500, but today it has 4,000, and so on, down the line. It was, as Emilio said, “an upside-down world.” And now in the region where Chávez had enjoyed 80% support from the workers for fourteen years, there was a seismic shift as the workers came out massively to vote for Capriles.

  So this would be another element explaining the shortages and scarcity of items in Venezuela: the expropriations and nationalizations. This would become an “anti-business” plan in which the company or the farm would be expropriated, the expropriated unit would double it
s workforce, and proceed to produce at half, or a quarter of its previous levels. The product of the nationalized economic unit, be it steel rods, aluminum bars, coffee, sugar, concrete, etc. would be affixed a “just price” that, in an economy approaching hyperinflation due to bad monetary policy, would immediately be lower than the cost of production, and voilà, the only remaining impulse would be to hoard, due to inflation and scarcity, to traffick, due to lower-than-market prices in the country, and to speculate, since the government was effectively providing a risk-free environment to do so, given that the value of commodities would be as certain to increase as the value of national money would be to decrease. So this was “socialismo Venezolano,” the “petrosocialism” in which bloated, non-productive state industries would be IV’d oil money so they could be showcased in re-election campaigns for the President.

  Emilio was sitting near the air conditioner but sweat still beaded on his forehead. I could tell he needed to go so I thanked him for his time and said goodbye and he strolled out of the office with a group of men who had been patiently waiting for the interview to end so they could attend to business.

  I was trying to keep a low profile because Timothy Tracy, another North American, had just been arrested for doing what I was doing: video-recording interviews with people in the opposition.16 For that reason I decided not to go to the May Day demonstrations, but I did head out to the mass rally the day before, on April 30 when Henrique Capriles came to Guayana to address the workers. It was a combination of a celebration of May Day, and a protest against the electoral fraud. Earlier in the day I did interviews with a number of union leaders, including Hernan Pacheco, from Bauxilum. I’d asked him who in the opposition would represent their interests, given that Capriles has often been associated with big capital. He responded, “Capriles himself! Look, he came to Guayana and sat down with us and listened to us as we talked about the problems of the country. Chávez never did that. He never bothered to ask us, the workers, what we needed and what the problems were!”

  They were all there at the rally, the union people I’d interviewed, including Emilio Campos, and thousands more. The officials at the airport had delayed Capriles in landing. After landing, there were more delays with Bolivarian officials so he was two or three hours late arriving, but the crowd waited for him. I took up a place near the stage and at one point a union official announced, “A North American writer, Clif Ross, is here with us,” and pointed me out to the crowd. I wanted to hide. It was just the kind of publicity I didn’t need if I hoped to avoid Tim Tracy’s fate.

  Capriles finally arrived and the crowd went wild. He gave an impassioned speech and I found myself involuntarily moved by his passion and the response of the crowd. Just as he was ending his speech, I made my way through the crowd, hoping to get ahead of everyone else so I could get a cab back to my posada before dark, and perhaps avoid being snatched up by the SEBIN (Bolivarian secret police) or mugged by a malandro (criminal). As I was walking toward a line of taxis an old man came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re that North American they were talking about, right?”

  I hesitated and then quickened my pace. He walked faster to keep up with me. We were both going the same direction, it appeared.

  “Yes,” I said at last. “But I really wished they hadn’t said anything. I’m here as a foreigner and have no protection from the government.”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “Well, neither do we.”

  Chapter Seventeen: An Anarchist in Caracas

  A few days later I left for Caracas where I hoped to get a few interviews. I took a room at the Hotel Odeon just to have something familiar to hold onto in a world that seemed to be changing so quickly that I couldn’t keep up with it. I looked out my window to see an enormous billboard of Nicolas Maduro glaring at me. Most of the small posters of Capriles scattered around the country had already been torn down, but the government-funded billboards of Maduro remained everywhere, as did the Chavista graffiti.

  I’d arranged to meet Rafael Uzcátegui in the morning and as I walked along the Avenida las Acacias toward Plaza Venezuela, everything looked the same: the newspaper kiosks, the man shining shoes in the shade of the pharmacy doorway, the woman frying empanadas in a big vat on the sidewalk. Nothing had changed but the world inside me, which was why I was suddenly seeing the world outside so differently.

  I met Rafael outside of the Gran Café and we went upstairs to do our interview. As we sat down I took a good look at him: long dreadlocks trailing down his back from under his cap. He appeared to be in his early thirties and I could imagine meeting someone like him anywhere in Berkeley or San Francisco at the Latin rock shows I frequented in the ’90s. Rafael seemed to be a person capable of traveling between many worlds: a “rockero,” human rights activist, writer, anarchist. As he began talking I regretted not having contacted him and the other anarchists of Caracas on earlier trips. They seemed to be my kind of people, an extension of my tribe in Berkeley.

  What was most striking for me, as Rafael talked, was his equanimity. In Venezuela I had gotten used to the manic energy common to Manichaean contexts where the polarization between Good and Evil generates sparks and even rods of lightning. Rafael had none of that, and he seemed somehow to be untouched by the phenomenon of polarization that Chávez had introduced into Venezuelan politics. Rafael was clearly more interested in honestly assessing the present problematic than he was to affixing blame, much less to assigning roles of Good or Evil to one or another side in a conflict. He seemed as comfortable criticizing the opposition as he was criticizing the Chavistas.

  Since 1995 Rafael has been involved in the Venezuelan anarchist scene and worked on the magazine, El Libertario. He made his living as a researcher for PROVEA, although at the time of this writing his title is that of “General Coordinator” of the organization. Rafael has written and published two books, the first titled Corazón de Tinta (Heart of Ink), which is a compilation of articles on culture and politics from ten years of writing. Rafael’s second book is Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, which has been translated and published in French and English.1 This latter book, Rafael described as “a synthesis of what we anarchists have thought and our critique of the Bolivarian process. He said “it includes the vision of other independent social actors of the left who, at present, due to the polarization in the country, have no place to express themselves.” This included many groups and organizations I’d never heard of, mostly because all left forces that hadn’t been included in, or joined, the Bolivarian project had been invisiblized by the government and its supporters—like Rafael and the anarchists in Caracas.

  Rafael talked about a large, diverse sector of the “revolutionary left” that hadn’t joined the Bolivarian project of Chávez. Tercer Camino (Third Way) and Rupture, which included the well-known guerrilla commander, Douglas Bravo; the union current CCURA (Corriente Clasista Unida Revolucionaria Autónoma, Autonomous United Revolutionary Class Current) organized with Orlando Chirino; Guevarist revolutionary groups; Christian base communities; pre-Chávez cooperativists like the well-known Cecosesola of Barquisimeto; militants working in the public health sector; the Committee of Victims against Police Abuse; indigenous people struggling against the mega-mining projects in the country, and many others. “These are the voices I wanted to include in the book [Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle] as a whole group of people who aren’t being properly recognized in their criticism of the government,” he said.

  I asked Rafael to talk about the polarization of the country, an intense polarization that many fear could slip into a civil war at any moment. He said that as a result of the polarization, the central political argument in the country was far too simplistic to accurately describe the complex process going on under the Bolivarians. “One side says that a Revolution is underway in Venezuela, while the other side says it’s a Castro-communist dictatorship,” he said. Rafael described the project of Chávez as a “nationalist project of a populist character with a left discou
rse and some authoritarian characteristics.” Recognizing that this same polarization of opinions about the Bolivarian process was a global phenomenon, Rafael suggested that people interested in Venezuela should try to get their news from a variety of conflicting sources to be able to understand the complex reality of the country and that “if people really want to know more, they could visit and see what’s happening on the street and what daily life is like for Venezuelans.”

  At first I thought I understood what Rafael meant when he went on to say that “the government of President Chávez has revitalized Venezuelan political culture.” I thought he might be talking about the community radio stations, the plethora of free and subsidized literature, the “circus” that now seemed only to be lacking in “bread.” But Rafael was referring to “the preponderance of the military; the figure of the strong personality, the personality of the caudillo; the use of the oil resources to give assets to people with few resources and capitalize on that through the electoral system; the attempt to create State ‘social organizations,’ for example the Chavista union movement which they tried to create by state decree, and different other ‘social’ organizations.”

  Ultimately, according to Rafael, this was no “revolution” because a revolutionary project would have implied a “rupture” with all that. “Nor has the government of President Chávez meant a rupture with economic globalization, but rather a continuation of the role of Venezuela within the international oil economy,” Rafael said, and “you can’t understand Venezuela without understanding the oil economy and the culture that it has generated in the country.”

  I asked Rafael what he thought about the Missions, the much-touted social programs that advocates of the Bolivarian process point to as indicators of the “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.” Rafael began to talk about the significance of Chávez’s emergence in the crisis of governability that the Caracazo of February 1989 represented. There had been a crisis with the system of elites and the democratic system was seen as needing a complete overhaul. “So it’s not a coincidence that a strong personality with a populist discourse of including the majority would be the person who would help to bring back this lost governability. Nor is it a coincidence that in other countries of Latin America where there have been large mass and social movements, as in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina, that you’d find similar figures: strong charismatic personalities with a discourse that would allow for the institutionalization of the demands of social movements.”